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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Fundamental ideas are portable ideas. Lisp didn't start out as a programming language. It was an abstract model of computation. As an ex-Symbolics employee friend of mine says, "Math never goes out of style."

Eschew what's popular and what gets attention. Seek the fundamental instead. This is the difference between learning about Ruby because Rails is the current big thing versus knowing enough to be interested in Ruby because it embodies the objects+messages model and you find that beautiful. (And if you value the objects+messages model because it was a big thing in academia at some point, you are still missing the point!)

Programming has many of the features of "pop-culture" because the rate of change in the field is faster than the rate of actual progress. Learn in-depth the actual progress.

EDIT: Switched the positions of fundamental and portable, since fundamental => portable.

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Everyone is some kind of fundamentalist, but people keep their ideas to themselves to keep an even keel because inexperience in expression tends towards bad outcomes. I have no scientific evidence for this, but this is my amateur reasoning in observing the personal growth in others.

Everyone is some kind of fundamentalist

This is an awkward phrase, as the word "fundamentalist" carries anti-intellectual baggage.

...inexperience in expression tends towards bad outcomes. I have no scientific evidence for this...

You now have one data point.

From this argument "Lisp" is a portable idea... and much as I love Lisp (and I do :-) it doesn't seem to have been a very portable outside of the kind of people who love Lisp.

Many ideas from Lisp have proven themselves very portable, and we see them in JavaScript, Scala, Haskell, and many other places today.

Some, like homoiconicity and macros, have been shot down whenever they tried to “achieve escape velocity"

Agree completely :-)

It was the idea that "Fundamental ideas are portable ideas" I was having problems with. Some are. Some aren't.

I love Lisp - and love the fact that other languages do more of the things that Lisp does. But in some cases it's taken decades for those features to get general acceptance. Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less likely to become portable.

To pick another example - I can remember being actively mocked by many different people in the eighties for the idea that any of object-oriented languages, garbage collected languages, or languages running on virtual machines would ever be used outside of academia (despite the fact that I was working on a RAD environment that included all three with some very happy industry customers :-)

Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less portable than any other kind of idea as far as I can see - the context and the language used to express the idea is much more important.

Portable ideas are fundamental ideas.

This is probably backwards.

True. Fundamental => Portable. But portability could be a function of something shallow but attractive.

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