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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that when you tap softened tongs around a workpiece into shape, they turn into parentheses. That's what reminds you of Lisp, not the malleability explanation that you invented afterward.

Lisp, Jazz, Aikido and (now) Blacksmithing.

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The distinction between Lisp and the programming languages widely adopted in the industry is a bit like the distinction between artist blacksmiths and fabricators. If blacksmiths have the skills and technique to transform the form of the metal materials they work with. While fabricators essentially rely upon the two operations of cutting and welding. Blacksmiths will use those two operations in their work, but also have the more plastic techniques of splitting, drifting, upsetting, fullering, etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1eu9gd9/comment/likzw...

These additional basic tools are created from essentially the same working material, on the fly, just like the tongs in TFA

This is a great analogy, particularly with one addition. That the two operations vary between fabricators so that, ideally, you have the two operations that work the best for your industry. That is the same difference between Lisp like languages and industrial languages, that the former allows you to build any domain language while the latter are already built domain languages. That is that when using Lisp you work like a sculptor, you build your language by removing expressiveness until you can only express your domain. Industrial languages have already removed the expressiveness and are adopted by people who find it useful for their working domain. The main difference is that the latter are more generalized to a category of domains vs. one particular domain. I think this is one of the key reasons they 'won' over more expressive languages like Lisp. They created a better common ground for related projects to collaborate on and collaboration is more important than domain expressiveness.

From this comment it follows that for “industrial” software, having less power actually allows for a greater degree of composition at a higher level. Whether “more power” is advantageous is contextually dependent. Having only cutting and welding at your disposal is, as a designer, somewhat freeing.

Are you accusing artist blacksmiths of spending too much time thinking about/admiring their ad hoc tools?

Cf Whitehead

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Actually no! The tools that make sense for industry are sometimes not specific enough for artists, and simultaneously the tools that make sense for artists are sometimes hard to generalize in an industrial setting where repeatability and composition are have greater importance to the success of the end product. My quibble is when folks say artist blacksmiths and industrial metal forming are the same and should be treated the same, to continue the metaphor.

The industrial metal factory needs an army of artisans to keep the equipment running.

Is this a definition for "advancing" regards civilization? Bc it is not happening, and it is arguable if it is good for us at all.

Whitehead probably did not consider how many "hobbyist blacksmiths" we would need to fix the abstractions when they leak

This comment reminded me of a Youtube channel I watch. The episode I was just watching had Kurtis making flogging spanners (wrenches intended to be used with a hammer) out of steel plate. Draw the outline, cut with a torch, smooth the edges with a grinder, done.

I love this analogy!

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