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> The key is "writing and maintaining" Lisp software. You may be right there, but I think there is a point you are smoothing over and almost trying to hide her

> The key is "writing and maintaining" Lisp software. You may be right there, but I think there is a point you are smoothing over and almost trying to hide here. What if someone can't get to the point where they are able to write useful code? If you can't start riding a bike without stabilisers or someone holding it, then you're never going to learn to ride well. At around age 11 or 12 I tried to learn to roller-skate. My parents bought me skates, and I put them on and tried to stand up. I fell over so much over a few days that I bruised my pelvis and walking became very painful, let alone lying down. It was horrible and I gave up. 25 years later I managed to learn to ride a snowboard, after years of failure, because of having to do an emergency turn to avoid hitting some children and getting up on one edge and learning that edge-riding is the key. Nobody told me, including 3 paid days of lessons with a professional teacher. It took great persistence and physical pain but I did it. I gave up on skating of any kind. My core point is that people vary widely in abilities. Some people pick up a complex motor skill in 10-15min and can do it and their skills grow from there. Others may struggle for days or weeks to attain that... And most are not doggedly determined enough to try for that long. Algebra is most schoolchildren's way of describing "something extremely hard to learn and pointless in everyday life." For ordinary humans, the concepts of "variables" and "symbols" that manipulate them IS A WAY TO TALK ABOUT something super-difficult. But most of it, with effort, can just about get through. Very very few choose to follow it further. And yet, there are a few families of programming languages -- Lisp, Forth, Postscript, HP calculator RPN -- whose basic guiding assumption is "you will easily master this basic action, so let's throw it away and move on to the logic underneath". And the people who like this family of languages are annoyed and offended that other languages that do not require this are hundreds of times more popular and are used by millions of people. Worse still, when someone comes and says "hey, maybe we can simplify that bit for ordinary folks", they mock and deride the efforts. Maybe just allow yourself to think: perhaps this stuff that's easy for me is hard for others, and I should not blame them for them finding it hard?

anthk 2y ago
The rule of three is algebra, yet every grandma knows it.
- lproven 2y ago
  What is "the rule of three"? I have never heard of it, and Googling it was not helpful. Conspiracy sites and rules for fiction writers and things.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Dunno. The only programming rule of 3 I know is that, in a C++ class, you provide a destructor, a copy constructor, and an assignment operator. But that doesn't fit either, because it's not really algebra, and every grandma certainly does not know it, and it doesn't fit in a Lisp article anyway.
  - anthk 2y ago
    The basic proportion matching formula which is just a linear equation in disguise. a/b = c/d, we know a, b and c, solve for d, which is cb / a. As I said, every grandma did that to guess some percentages. Thus, if anyone can grasp that, he/she is ready for Algebra.
    - lproven 2y ago
      Never heard of this before, and no, I do not think my own mother could do this. Again: I think you badly underestimate how hard this stuff is.
      - anthk 2y ago
        Ever? A book costs $20. How many books could you get with $200? That's it. Even my granma living in a remote village understood it.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    The person you are replying to clearly stated that every grandma knows this, and yet you seem to have given up without even trying to ask a grandma.
    - 2y ago
lispm 2y ago
> If you can't start riding a bike without stabilisers or someone holding it, then you're never going to learn to ride well. In German: "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen". We all start somewhere, we go to school, we have teachers, we have trainers/coaches, we have mentors, ... I don't think studying it alone will help, best is with people around. Parents and friends will help us to learn how to ride a bike. They will give an example, they will give feedback on our attempts, they will propose what and how to try to master it. After the initial basic hurdle is done, then comes a lot of practice. But again, best by being embedded in a community. Learning such skills is a social activity. There is a lot of pedagogical material to learn programming with Lisp, Logo, Scheme. I had courses about software development, using languages like PASCAL, LISP, Scheme and others. We got exercises and feedback. We got access to computers, cpu time and an environment for coding. I looked around and setup my own tools and wrote stuff with it. I discussed this stuff (code, environment, architecture, styles, ...) with a friend. > perhaps this stuff that's easy for me is hard for others, and I should not blame them for them finding it hard? Lot's of people are frightened by thinking/hearing that it is hard, while in fact it actually isn't. For example one of reads that German is very difficult for native English speakers. There are a lot of justifications given for that. The actual data says something different. German is very near to English, English even is a Germanic language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages The actual ranking: https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/ https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag... Trying to learn Lisp without actually trying to write code, sounds like trying to learn a language without actually trying to speak with people. Possible, but unnecessary hard. We need to make our brain adapt to the new language by moving into an environment, where the words connect to the real world and thus to meaning. Maybe just allow yourself to think: Giving feedback is not "blaming". That's an early concept needed for moving forward.
- lproven 2y ago
  I think you are wrong. Let me try to demonstrate with a parallel example. > "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen" My best guess is: A master does not ready from heaven fall? One does not instantly become a master? Different people find different skills easy. So: ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch spreche. Nicht so viel, und mein Deutsch is nicht gut; es is sehr, sehr schlecht. Aber fur meine Ferien es genug ist. Ich hat drei Tage Deutsch gestudiert, unt es war in 1989. Drei tage, am ein bus vom Insel Man nach der Rhein. I am fairly good with languages. I can communicate in 6 foreign languages. Currently, I am studying Czech, because my wife is Czech, and I would like to be able to speak with her family, some of whom speak no English, or German, French, Spanish or anything else I speak at all. Czech is really hard. It makes German look like an easy beginner's language. In place of German's 4 cases, Czech has 7; in place of German's 3 genders, Czech has 4. (Czechs think there are 3, but really there are 4. Polish has 5.) I am somewhere past A2 level Czech, beginning B1, and I can hold a simple conversation, mainly in the present tense. But I started at age 45 and it took me about 5 or 6 years of work to get to this level. Basic tourist German I got in about 30 or 40 hours of hard work when I was 20 years old. I am not bad at languages. I am terrible at mathematics and very poor at programming. I used to be capable and proficient in BASIC and fairly good in FORTRAN. I managed a simple RLE monochrome image compression and decompression program in C, and an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in Pascal, and that is the height of my achievement. I am pretty good at getting other people's code working, though. Enough to be paid to do it for decades. I find Python quite hard -- weird complicated stuff like objects comes in early, and nasty C syntax peeks through even simple stuff like printing numbers. Lisp, though, switches from just about comprehensible code to line noise very quickly after the level of "Hello world". I got hold of a copy of SICP. It's famous. It's meant to be really good. I could not follow page 1 of the actual tutorial. Perhaps you know it. In section 1.1.1, it says: « (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) which the interpreter would readily evaluate to be 57. We can help ourselves by writing such an expression in the form (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) following a formatting convention known as pretty-printing, in which each long combination is written so that the operands are aligned vertically. The resulting indentations display clearly the structure of the expression.6 » The "helpful" pretty-printed part is incomprehensible to me. Section 1.1.1 is about where I gave up. I think that this kind of issue is not just me. Again: I submit that a bunch of people good at a very difficult skill are badly over estimating how good ordinary folks would be at it. Most people can't program. Most people can't do mathematics. Most people are not good at this stuff. The people that can do maths and can program mostly can only program in simple, infix-notation, imperative languages. Functional languages, or even prefix- and postfix-notation, is a step further than I suspect that 99% of humans can go. And the attitude of those who can do it to those of us who can't do it is really not pleasant.
kazinator 2y ago
> What if someone can't get to the point where they are able to write useful code? Then I still won't believe it's a Lisp syntax problem, unless they have a background of success with other languages. Some people don't have a knack for programming. Among them, some try this and that, and falter in various ways. > And the people who like this family of languages are annoyed and offended that other languages that do not require this are hundreds of times more popular and are used by millions of people. Those other languages are harder because of their syntax. Languages that remove syntax are an affront to the self-image that people have built up over their mastery of convoluted syntax. For most ordinary people, learning programming is equated with learning syntax. When they are memorizing things like that >> has a higher precedence than +, they feel they are getting smarter. The idea that this stuff is not necessary, and that you actually don't know jack if you don't know semantics, is a huge threat. Once a beginner is off into a syntax-heavy language, chances are high we have lost them forever, due to simple ego effects.

anthk 2y ago

The rule of three is algebra, yet every grandma knows it.

lproven 2y ago
What is "the rule of three"? I have never heard of it, and Googling it was not helpful. Conspiracy sites and rules for fiction writers and things.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Dunno. The only programming rule of 3 I know is that, in a C++ class, you provide a destructor, a copy constructor, and an assignment operator. But that doesn't fit either, because it's not really algebra, and every grandma certainly does not know it, and it doesn't fit in a Lisp article anyway.
- anthk 2y ago
  The basic proportion matching formula which is just a linear equation in disguise. a/b = c/d, we know a, b and c, solve for d, which is cb / a. As I said, every grandma did that to guess some percentages. Thus, if anyone can grasp that, he/she is ready for Algebra.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Never heard of this before, and no, I do not think my own mother could do this. Again: I think you badly underestimate how hard this stuff is.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Ever? A book costs $20. How many books could you get with $200? That's it. Even my granma living in a remote village understood it.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  The person you are replying to clearly stated that every grandma knows this, and yet you seem to have given up without even trying to ask a grandma.
  - 2y ago

lispm 2y ago

> If you can't start riding a bike without stabilisers or someone holding it, then you're never going to learn to ride well. In German: "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen". We all start somewhere, we go to school, we have teachers, we have trainers/coaches, we have mentors, ... I don't think studying it alone will help, best is with people around. Parents and friends will help us to learn how to ride a bike. They will give an example, they will give feedback on our attempts, they will propose what and how to try to master it. After the initial basic hurdle is done, then comes a lot of practice. But again, best by being embedded in a community. Learning such skills is a social activity. There is a lot of pedagogical material to learn programming with Lisp, Logo, Scheme. I had courses about software development, using languages like PASCAL, LISP, Scheme and others. We got exercises and feedback. We got access to computers, cpu time and an environment for coding. I looked around and setup my own tools and wrote stuff with it. I discussed this stuff (code, environment, architecture, styles, ...) with a friend. > perhaps this stuff that's easy for me is hard for others, and I should not blame them for them finding it hard? Lot's of people are frightened by thinking/hearing that it is hard, while in fact it actually isn't. For example one of reads that German is very difficult for native English speakers. There are a lot of justifications given for that. The actual data says something different. German is very near to English, English even is a Germanic language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages The actual ranking: https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/ https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag... Trying to learn Lisp without actually trying to write code, sounds like trying to learn a language without actually trying to speak with people. Possible, but unnecessary hard. We need to make our brain adapt to the new language by moving into an environment, where the words connect to the real world and thus to meaning. Maybe just allow yourself to think: Giving feedback is not "blaming". That's an early concept needed for moving forward.

lproven 2y ago
I think you are wrong. Let me try to demonstrate with a parallel example. > "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen" My best guess is: A master does not ready from heaven fall? One does not instantly become a master? Different people find different skills easy. So: ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch spreche. Nicht so viel, und mein Deutsch is nicht gut; es is sehr, sehr schlecht. Aber fur meine Ferien es genug ist. Ich hat drei Tage Deutsch gestudiert, unt es war in 1989. Drei tage, am ein bus vom Insel Man nach der Rhein. I am fairly good with languages. I can communicate in 6 foreign languages. Currently, I am studying Czech, because my wife is Czech, and I would like to be able to speak with her family, some of whom speak no English, or German, French, Spanish or anything else I speak at all. Czech is really hard. It makes German look like an easy beginner's language. In place of German's 4 cases, Czech has 7; in place of German's 3 genders, Czech has 4. (Czechs think there are 3, but really there are 4. Polish has 5.) I am somewhere past A2 level Czech, beginning B1, and I can hold a simple conversation, mainly in the present tense. But I started at age 45 and it took me about 5 or 6 years of work to get to this level. Basic tourist German I got in about 30 or 40 hours of hard work when I was 20 years old. I am not bad at languages. I am terrible at mathematics and very poor at programming. I used to be capable and proficient in BASIC and fairly good in FORTRAN. I managed a simple RLE monochrome image compression and decompression program in C, and an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in Pascal, and that is the height of my achievement. I am pretty good at getting other people's code working, though. Enough to be paid to do it for decades. I find Python quite hard -- weird complicated stuff like objects comes in early, and nasty C syntax peeks through even simple stuff like printing numbers. Lisp, though, switches from just about comprehensible code to line noise very quickly after the level of "Hello world". I got hold of a copy of SICP. It's famous. It's meant to be really good. I could not follow page 1 of the actual tutorial. Perhaps you know it. In section 1.1.1, it says: « (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) which the interpreter would readily evaluate to be 57. We can help ourselves by writing such an expression in the form (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) following a formatting convention known as pretty-printing, in which each long combination is written so that the operands are aligned vertically. The resulting indentations display clearly the structure of the expression.6 » The "helpful" pretty-printed part is incomprehensible to me. Section 1.1.1 is about where I gave up. I think that this kind of issue is not just me. Again: I submit that a bunch of people good at a very difficult skill are badly over estimating how good ordinary folks would be at it. Most people can't program. Most people can't do mathematics. Most people are not good at this stuff. The people that can do maths and can program mostly can only program in simple, infix-notation, imperative languages. Functional languages, or even prefix- and postfix-notation, is a step further than I suspect that 99% of humans can go. And the attitude of those who can do it to those of us who can't do it is really not pleasant.

kazinator 2y ago

> What if someone can't get to the point where they are able to write useful code? Then I still won't believe it's a Lisp syntax problem, unless they have a background of success with other languages. Some people don't have a knack for programming. Among them, some try this and that, and falter in various ways. > And the people who like this family of languages are annoyed and offended that other languages that do not require this are hundreds of times more popular and are used by millions of people. Those other languages are harder because of their syntax. Languages that remove syntax are an affront to the self-image that people have built up over their mastery of convoluted syntax. For most ordinary people, learning programming is equated with learning syntax. When they are memorizing things like that >> has a higher precedence than +, they feel they are getting smarter. The idea that this stuff is not necessary, and that you actually don't know jack if you don't know semantics, is a huge threat. Once a beginner is off into a syntax-heavy language, chances are high we have lost them forever, due to simple ego effects.