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drob518 • last Tuesday at 12:43 PM • 7 replies • view on HN

You don’t program in Lisp, do you? I used to be confused by the smug Lisp weenies. Now I am one. And the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable. You either “get it” or you don’t. Yes, it has macros, but macros are a bit overrated. I’ve been programming in Lisp for decades and I rarely write macros. I think the thing that is difficult to convey is how powerful Lisp’s core execution environment is while at the same time being just a page of code that a CS undergraduate can understand. Literally everything else is a library. And those libraries can create syntax, generate code on the fly, and do many other powerful things. But most people won’t “get it” until they take the plunge. I didn’t. Until I did. And now, I don’t feel a need to defend Lisp at all. It won’t go away. You can’t kill it. The folks that “get it” will always have it, and those that don’t “get it” will reach for their Blub language again and again. Such is the way of the world.

Replies

matheusmoreira • last Tuesday at 4:43 PM

Yeah, I didn't get it either until I implemented my own lisp.

> the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable

I've found that getting rid of the parentheses helps.

  f(x)
  (f x)
  ["f", "x"]

  (print (< 10 20))
  ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
Lisp code is just normal Python lists which get evaluated by an interpreter function. Like this:

  code = ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]

  def eval(code):
      # magic

  eval(code)
  True
Filling out that eval function is a great way to learn lisp.

These articles are very good and accessible:

https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html

https://norvig.com/lispy2.html

frwrfwrfeefwf • last Tuesday at 5:30 PM

Getting lisp is analogous to spiritual enlightenment. If someone doesn't have the eyes to see and ears to hear, there's little you can do for them, except pray.

atdt • last Tuesday at 11:09 PM

Is the magic a property of the broader language-family (and could be experienced with Janet, Racket, whatever), or Common Lisp specifically? When people praise the core execution environment they're typically praising Common Lisp specifically.

What's the quintessential "now I get it" experience, in your mind?

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layer8 • last Tuesday at 1:25 PM

There are reasons why not that many programmers “get it”, and it’s not because the others are uninformed. It’s a matter of valuing different things.

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maleldil • last Tuesday at 3:40 PM

> You don’t program in Lisp, do you?

Not anymore. I started with Racket and went through the Little Schemer. I did Clojure for a while. I even used Babashka to write all my scripts, then later rewrote them in other languages.

I gave it a good try. Maybe it wasn't enough to properly "get it"?

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cdelsolar • last Tuesday at 1:31 PM

this is incredibly smug, but fun to read :) I briefly "got" Clojure but forgot again. Maybe I'll give this Janet thing a try.

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cmrdporcupine • last Tuesday at 6:04 PM

Honestly... it's entirely possible to "get" Lisp and at the same time not really see anything that compelling about it for doing your own work.

I "get" Lisp just fine, have made my own hobby Lisp interpreters, have written programs in Lisp, am an emacs user, etc. etc.

And yet if you handed me a terminal and an editor and asked me to write a program, I would never reach for Lisp to do it. My eyes don't like it. (Also I like static types).