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Clojure was my first programming language. I've been playing around with a language with pointers recently, and I wonder if you could explain to me what you mea

• dschiptsov 12y ago
  AI guys had this notion that words of a human language act as pointers to "inner representation" of some "concept of the mind". It is not a coincidence that Lisp was the language of early AI. They believed that this set of features is good-enough to "program" intelligence. The intention of my comment was to show that there is nothing much to talk about, especially there is no "mysticism" or "that special attitude".
• drcomputer 12y ago
  In lisp, think of symbols as things that represent other things. Instead of having to evaluate each expression in the complexity that the programmer builds, everything can be substituted until the computer is left with a simple but expansive form. The machine is very good at evaluating this simple form, because it only needs to look up a few things to process the entire calculation, which is really just a collection of an ordered organization of the same calculations over and over again. A pointer is not the actual data. It's just a trail of connections that eventually lead to the data you want, instead of having to manage a bunch of data you don't need to, or want to manage. It's computationally efficient and it is elegant. It represents exactly what you tell it to represent.