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comment by mk
mk  ·  1248 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Intuition for Lisp Syntax

Yes, but I didn't start with a blank slate. Hubski started as a fork of Hacker News, which is written in Paul Graham's Arc, which is a Lisp.

I doubt we share much code anymore with HN. Also, a bit of Hubski is now in Racket, which is also a Lisp, on which Arc is dependent.

Actually, the only other languages that I have real familiarity with are Javascript and Fortran. I'm going to start learning Swift next month.

Lisp feels intuitive and natural to me. I don't comment my code, and even with all the parantheses and time away, it remains very readable to me. The idea that code can be data feels right. I suspect that the difference between people that like Lisp and people that don't has something to do with how they think. In physics, I found that people seem to have a natural aptitude for either differential equations or linear algebra, but more rarely both. I suspect that something similar is the case with Lisp.





user-inactivated  ·  1247 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cool, I didn't know there was a HN connection but now I can see it. I've only used some Lisp-like languages with tools Emacs and now logseq, but never in production.

In my experience, the linear algebra / differential equation analogy for software development is OOP / functional.

Have fun learning Swift, I really enjoy using it, especially compared to Obj-C (though I know that is a controversial opinion in some circles). Swift has some interesting applications outside of iOS / MacOS as well, including being one of the few languages which currently supports differentiable programming!

Devac  ·  1246 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The idea that code can be data feels right.

I'm in that weird boat where I 'get' how and some of the possible consequences of thereof, but never got to the point where it struck me as useful for something I'm doing or plan to make. Functional programming turned out to be the more intuitive one, for sure, but this kind of Lisp-ism trips the hell out of me.

Worked through a bunch of books and articles since that post, mostly from bfv's and (IIRC) flaga's recommendations, but at this point, I think it's a good time hang my gloves. Haskell can be a performance beast, Scheme was fun, but Lisp repeatedly proves itself to be beyond me right about the time you call for some metalinguistic gizmo to write a macro that's (IMO) less transparent than Duff's device. But, according to the author, makes everything better. All this effort did is made me see those are rarely empty promises, but that's about it. Damn shame, really.

    In physics, I found that people seem to have a natural aptitude for either differential equations or linear algebra, but more rarely both.

Yeah, it was one of those observations that became obvious in hindsight. Just as to why we are rushed so 'senselessly' to at least start Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds while we're still freshmen. Then, around the time QM showed the transition of Heisenberg's and Schrodinger's pictures, it clicked for real. Took a while, less than Lisp though. :)