Comment by stephth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephth | Hacker News Reader

From one page the author linked to [1]:

"Because coders DO NOT LIKE LISP. Most programmers find Lisp unpleasant and unnatural to use. They're not idiots, they're not ignorant, and they're not willfully choosing a less-powerful or less-efficient tool, they're choosing tools based on what makes them productive and happy."

The "profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get [functional programming]" [2] is a mystery that I've been trying to figure out, albeit slowly since the day only has 24h. I've gone through the Peepcode video on Clojure and I couldn't find an answer, and I didn't even feel attracted to the language, quite unlike my first Ruby experience.

Then the other day I watched Matz - creator of Ruby - talking about Ruby 2.0, and he used the word "happy" multiple times to explain how he wants developers to feel when using his language, and I thought of how brilliantly he's succeeded. I have now spent more time coding in Objective-C than any other language (iOS development), and every hour I code Objective-C I miss Ruby and how happy it makes me feel.

I find that happiness is highly overlooked in discussions about programming.

[1] http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.371875....

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

(edit: formatting)

> The "profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get [functional programming]" [2]

Nitpick: the quote is not exactly about functional programming, it's about Lisp. Though Lisp is often used as a functional language, there are very lisp-ish features such as macros and the (lack of) syntax that you will not necessarily find in other functional languages.

That said, if you want to learn functional programming but are put off by Lisp's feel, you could try Haskell or OCaml or F#.

Have you looked at "The Joy of Clojure"? I thought the authors did a very good job of showing why exactly they're so excited to be working with the language.

In any case, this is very much a question of discourse. For historical reasons Lisp (at least Common Lisp) seems to have this reputation of being associated with deadly serious people, or alternatively smug lisp weenies, while Ruby people talk about how happy it makes them feel all the time, even though there are plenty of people who clearly have fun with Lisp (even "crufty" "old" CL), and I'm sure many people would regard working with Ruby a chore. I mean, to each his own, I honestly can't imagine there's an objective scale on which CL (much less exciting new languages like Clojure) is "less fun" than Ruby. Things like homoiconicity, on the other, are objective criteria for comparing languages. There are plenty of reasons to like (say) Python better than (say) CL, but to say that homoiconicity or restarts or MOP are no big deal because if you try hard enough you can replicate 95% of that functionality in (say) Perl is a different question entirely.

to each his own

That was pretty much my point. That maybe the solution to the mystery of the "profound enlightenment experience" around Lisp is that it makes some very happy, but not me.

Have you looked at "The Joy of Clojure"?

I haven't, I'll look into it, thanks. I haven't given up on solving that mystery yet.

Since Lisp, Smalltalk and Matz came up, I remembered what Matz said[1]:

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html

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