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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

LISPs power is it's problem. Why would I want a powerful language?

I want a language that has one and only one obvious way to do things. That doesn't require building my own language features or choosing an addon that might or might not be compatible with others.

I don't have any use for the flexibility to customize a language because I want a language that doesn't need to be customized.

If I was doing cutting edge AI i might feel differently, but I'm not. The stuff I do has only one place for creativity and that's the UI. The code should be boring and utterly forgettable. If someone remembers your code, it's probably because they had to spend time looking at it when they could have been writing unit tests or moving on to new features.

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> Why would I want a powerful language?

You clearly don't, since your aim is to write boring and forgettable code. I don't think there is anything wrong with that -- you can write boring code to solve interesting and worthwhile problems, and overall the tendency is probably to err on the side of getting distracted by hip or shiny tech. But some people enjoy writing interesting code, and sometimes interesting code is needed to solve interesting problems and a powerful language can make certain types of interesting code much less painful to write. Auto-differentiation might be a good example.

That's definitely fair, there does seem to still be plenty of worthwhile problems that require interesting code.

It's mostly way above my level though, so for now I'll stick to solving the trivial stuff, so the real geniuses can get back to work.

Nobody might ever say "Wow that's some great code", in fact they'll probably say it's bloated and mediocre... but they'll be glad I thought to put an override button for that one edge case of the super trivial thing they thought was fine!

Enlightenment doesn't come from actually using LISP, I've concluded, after years of feeling dumb about it. It comes from understanding how LISP is built. Once you understand how LISP is built, you'd never actually use it for a serious project.

My key take aways from learning how LISP is built: 1) Code & data can be unified into the same thing. This isn't particularly deep if you know the concept of an AST. 2) You can bootstrap a language from a simplified version of the language. Repeat this a few times and you get a fancy language. This isn't particularly deep if you've built any compiler, or if you've built LaTeX. 3) You can build beautiful things if you disregard the grittiness of reality. LISP offers an abstraction of physical computers that does not at all resemble a real computer. Some people like this abstraction. Maybe because they don't like how computers actually work.

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