Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: Lisp

[Jan Hudec]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 21:32:50 -0800, Joshua Haberman wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 19:16, Tom Lord wrote:
> > Learn lisp.   It's good for your brain.
> 
> Enough clearly intelligent people are interested in Lisp for me to want
> to know what they're excited about.  I'm not trying to make a case for
> why I don't have to learn Lisp, I just want to be convinced that there's
> something worthwhile I missed the first few times around.  To me Lisp is
> an indie band with a group of fiercely devoted followers and whose music
> is definitely esoteric but not compelling.  They get it and I don't.
> 
> I have worked with Lisp some, and I've read both books and code.  I want
> to arm myself with the right mindset so that I'll actually get something
> from it the next time around.

In most programming languages, to solve a problem, you bend the problem
to fit the language. In lisp, you bend the language to fit the problem.
The usual way is less thinking and more work. The lisp way is more
thinking and less work and the resulting solution often (i mean, it is
possible in lisp but not in most other languages) has kind of ellegance
(in a similar way good mathematical teories are ellegant).

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                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>