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Part of the problem is that lisp evangelism sets itself up to fail. An instantaneous blinding moment of enlightenment, would you like fries with that? Haven't t

Part of the problem is that lisp evangelism sets itself up to fail. An instantaneous blinding moment of enlightenment, would you like fries with that? Haven't they heard that you shouldn't start a joke with "This is the most hilarious thing ever"? I've been doing lisp for several years now. I've built several interpreters. I've never had the enlightenment he describes. The minor epiphanies have been on par with oo design and unit tests. I've travelled far over the months, but it's closer to grok than zen.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Enlightenment epiphanies result in proselytizing. Can't be helped, its like tapping your knee with a rubber mallet makes your leg kick out. The 'secret' or the thing that most people don't get early on when programming, is that code is data and data is code. A binary tree is data that is carefully surrounded by the semantics of the data's relationship with its peers. Reading the structure reads out the data in sorted order. Lisp just makes that painfully clear, that there is no distinction between state and semantics as far as computers are concerned and it allows you to move the 'computation' between data structures and algorithm at any point. A grad student at USC explained it well when he described it like learning your third or fourth spoken language, Suddenly you brain "flips" from having three or four different ways of naming 'milk' into a single concept of milk with an infinite number of ways to identify it. The relationship between the root concept and the expression of that concept change precedence in your thought process. Once you have made that switch you can write code in any computer language.
- kinleyd 14y ago
  Very nicely put. imho, it could serve as the tl;dr for the op, which was also excellent.
aerique 14y ago
Nice to hear I'm not the only one. I've been using Lisp (mainly Common Lisp) for quite a few years now but never had that flash of enlightenment either. Discovering Lisp always seemed more like coming home: "Ah, this is how I always thought what programming was supposed to be like!" No fighting with the compiler or being limited by what the PL designer thought you should do, just a pretty direct path from thought to code.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Enlightenment epiphanies result in proselytizing. Can't be helped, its like tapping your knee with a rubber mallet makes your leg kick out. The 'secret' or the thing that most people don't get early on when programming, is that code is data and data is code. A binary tree is data that is carefully surrounded by the semantics of the data's relationship with its peers. Reading the structure reads out the data in sorted order. Lisp just makes that painfully clear, that there is no distinction between state and semantics as far as computers are concerned and it allows you to move the 'computation' between data structures and algorithm at any point. A grad student at USC explained it well when he described it like learning your third or fourth spoken language, Suddenly you brain "flips" from having three or four different ways of naming 'milk' into a single concept of milk with an infinite number of ways to identify it. The relationship between the root concept and the expression of that concept change precedence in your thought process. Once you have made that switch you can write code in any computer language.

kinleyd 14y ago
Very nicely put. imho, it could serve as the tl;dr for the op, which was also excellent.

aerique 14y ago

Nice to hear I'm not the only one. I've been using Lisp (mainly Common Lisp) for quite a few years now but never had that flash of enlightenment either. Discovering Lisp always seemed more like coming home: "Ah, this is how I always thought what programming was supposed to be like!" No fighting with the compiler or being limited by what the PL designer thought you should do, just a pretty direct path from thought to code.