Comment by 51Cards
4 years ago
I always loved working in LISP, it was just so concise and really made you focus on code structure and hierachy. Need to get back into it again sometime.
4 years ago
I always loved working in LISP, it was just so concise and really made you focus on code structure and hierachy. Need to get back into it again sometime.
Agreed, there's something special about LISPs I can't quite put my finger on. Which is kind of funny, because I've never used any lisp professionally and I don't think there are very many use cases I'd use one for.
Maybe SICP is just an unreasonably excellent book?
To me, the specialness of LISPs comes from the uniformity of the syntax (which in turn makes code easier to understand and reason about). This is probably highly subjective!
That said, SICP is unreasonably excellent :)
I've enjoyed messing around with Lisp, but for me the uniformity of the syntax makes it harder to reason about - everything looks the same, big blobs of parenthesis.
That's part of its appeal, but also a big part of its downfall I think - other languages can utilize a wider "Ascii spectrum" and represent different things in lexically different ways, making it easier to distinguish at a glance.
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Just adding on to this thread as a fairly new lisp enthusiast. I picked up SICP during the pandemic and have really fallen in the lisp rabbit hole and it has been super fun.
I’ve mostly been toying with scheme (guile) and a bit of clojure.
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The syntax for me is a drag on the language. Make me spend more than a 2 seconds trying to untangle parameters from function name and you lost me.
What I think made the language special is its level of abstractness. Unless I am mistaken, it is the first language where you could manipulate function as a first-class citizen. This and the ability to use closure. 60 years ago, it was really innovative.
Now, javascript does it...
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