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Comment by simulate-me | Hacker News Reader

Not really. I want to understand why the language is interesting. For instance, even though I know nothing about Lisp, I can guess that it supports booleans, integers, and floats. Tuples and complex numbers are kind of interesting. But then it goes on to strings and concatenation, which I already assumed were possible in Lisp.

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The Hy page had way too much syntax, but the Hissp Quick Start didn't have enough? Or not soon enough? One does have to understand the little pieces to make sense of the big ones. You want something in between? Can you point to an example at the right level?

Ctrl+F and try skipping to ";;;; The Basic Macros" section on that quick start page. Is that about the right level?

For many of the "popular" languages, a simple cheat sheet showing the equivalent control structures in a common language might be enough for a typical programmer to get a handle on it quickly. But Lisp is not an Algol-family language. It's different enough that such a document would fail to convey what makes it interesting. There's an inferential gap that must be bridged first, and it's difficult to do that quickly; a programmer mistakenly [expecting a short inferential distance][1] may not have the patience to "get it".

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-...

Using Go as an example, if I were to write a "Why Go" article, it might look something like this:

1) Simple, one way to do everything. for loops, code formatting, and project setup.

2) Good concurrency (go routines)

3) No exceptions, readable code and error handling.

This article is titled "Why Hy." It should sell me on the language with a philosophy supported by examples, not instruct me on how to write a floating point number (unless the language has a interesting take on writing floating point numbers!)

In that case, would the Hissp README https://github.com/gilch/hissp#readme be an appropriate introductory article in your view? It opens with some small examples and concludes with some design philosophy.

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