The Nature of Lisp | Hacker News Reader

The Nature of Lisp

defmacro.org

27 pointsiamelgringo6 comments

Been lurking here for awhile, but this article compelled me to finally register. It's the best introductory article I've ever read for any language. The XML analogy instantly illuminated the basic Lisp ideology for me, and it's a great example of how seemingly obscure language concepts can make immediate sense when presented in a familiar way.

"Learning Lisp is an uphill battle. Even though in Computer Science terms Lisp is an ancient language, few people to date figured out how to teach it well enough to make it accessible. Despite great efforts by many Lisp advocates, learning Lisp today is still hard."

I agree. I'm going from newb to lisper, and it hurts.

Learning Lisp is hard up front but makes things easy later. Last week we got a digital photo frame to see how well it worked with ourdoings.com and found that, though it worked, 4 new RSS feeds would be a big win. I implemented them in about 20 minutes in Scheme. Added few lines to the codebase. In other languages I would have been tempted to cut/paste.

For more on the photo frame and RSS feeds, see

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01

"Code is also always data! Does it mean that data is also always code? As crazy as this sounds this very well might be the case."

My programming languages professor (a Scheme fanatic) expressed a similar sentiment. I recall, however, someone posting this "programmer hierarchy" recently:

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/061226.html

I find it funny that the hierarchy has "Lisp programmers" at the top and "people who insist on calling HTML a programming language" on the bottom, yet the people I've seen arguing for the programming language status of HTML are predominantly Lisp programmers.

you know. the first course of the computer science degree at my undergraduate university (rice). was a lisp course. and though i wasn't one of the many who griped and groaned about working in something other than c/c++ or java, five years later and i'm only starting to appreciate the perspective it's given me.

There was a good thread last week about learning Lisp:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126186 (a child comment on that thread that summed up a lot of the ideas).

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