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Comment by atdt | Hacker News Reader

Is the magic a property of the broader language-family (and could be experienced with Janet, Racket, whatever), or Common Lisp specifically? When people praise the core execution environment they're typically praising Common Lisp specifically.

What's the quintessential "now I get it" experience, in your mind?

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Any Lisp will do. I had mine with CL and now use Clojure. Racket is great. I’ve never used Janet, but it looks great, too. Pick one. But make sure you engage with the community and ask about editors and tooling. Don’t just fire up VSCode and start typing parentheses. If you do that, you’ll just be frustrated. And nobody who programs in Lisp does that. We use lots of plug-ins and have a live REPL right in our editors at all times. In other words, do what Lisp programmers do. If you try to “do Lisp” the same way you “do JavaScript” or whatever, you’re just going to get frustrated.

If I could explain the moment, I would. But I really can’t. That said, one aha moment for me was reading McCarthy’s original Lisp paper and realizing the whole core of the language was a single page (17).

https://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/lehre/pi3/folien/...

> What's the quintessential "now I get it" experience, in your mind?

Learning that https://calva.io/paredit/ exists and moving your cursor along the AST or moving expressions around with nice hotkeys. Then making simple macros for infix notation and SQL and so on, which operate on the AST too. Realizing that there is no "architecture" because any repeated code or pattern can be easily abstracted away with a macro. Realizing that you can just describe your problem on paper, making up the perfect notation, then implement that notation in a few hours.

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