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since I don't consider myself to be anywhere near the top percentile, I felt that my programming chops might not be adequate enough to learn it. See? The magic
by wonderzombie 14y ago
since I don't consider myself to be anywhere near the top percentile, I felt that my programming chops might not be adequate enough to learn it.
See? The magic was within you all along.
:)
I wonder if the causation is confused, here. That is, you do not need to be a top percentile programmer to understand or use Lisp. You are -- or become -- a top percentile programmer because you've learned Lisp.
I don't know if the relationship is as direct as all that. But I do think that if you learn and internalize some of the lessons of Lisp, it will expose you to new ways of thinking about programming as well a programming problems, and this is correlated with being a good programmer.
One particular example: the close relationship between code and data in Lisp pulls aside the curtain a bit on some concepts which are more obscured in languages like Java or C++.
- jwdunne 14y agoI don't know about Lisp making me a top-percentile programmer but I do know learning Lisp has improved my skills (not mastering, of course, but becoming comfortable reading & writing code in it). I also feel what I've read from SICP has helped massively too. For one, recursion. I 'got' it as far as the fact it's a function calling itself but it was only through digesting Lisp books, writing lisp and talking about Lisp that I finally got it. SICP helped further with recursive-iterative stuff too - it doesn't just need to call itself to be recursive. Another is functional programming. There are many more but the point is that I could have learned all these concepts, mentioned or not, in other languages but it was the simplicity of Lisp that I feel allowed me to truly understand them. I also feel if I dedicated more time into Lisp, I'd get much more than just a new language out of it.