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ASK: What is Lisp Enlightment?
2 points by kinnard 2936 days ago | 3 comments
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

I've been exploring for a while, but I'm still close to stumped. What is the enlightenment Raymond speaks of?



3 points by akkartik 2935 days ago | link

I think the "enlightenment" happened when the only other language people had programmed in was at the level of Fortran or C. Here's another quote in response:

"There have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them. As computers have grown more powerful, the new languages being developed have been moving steadily toward the Lisp model. A popular recipe for new programming languages in the past 20 years has been to take the C model of computing and add to it, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection." (http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html)

At this point it's only macros that separate Lisp from other languages (though languages like Rust have been trying to steal that as well). So don't go looking for enlightenment. Everybody's trajectory is different.

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1 point by kinnard 2903 days ago | link

I now disagree: I realized my cognitive process might actually be the lambda calculus.

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2 points by kinnard 2934 days ago | link

That makes sense.

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