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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

I can relate. I read Graham's book on Common Lisp more than 20 years ago and was entranced.

But opportunities to use it in the day job are few and far between, and I would have qualms about recommending it, in most contexts. For a lot of purposes, its libraries are just nowhere near as good as Python or JavaScript or Java. And some of its superpowers (macros!) can also be used really, really badly.

There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" that captured some of what would give me pause. On average, most shops have average people (for that occupation/industry). Not sure Lisp is the best solution for that context.

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> There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people"

Presumably, you are referring to The Bipolar Lisp Programmer[1], an HN classic[2].

[1] https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bipolar+lisp+programmer

No, I was referring to this: https://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html

I write Go for a living. I run Emacs. I read the first part of the article, thinking about how Lisp used in a personal project makes so much sense because you can build the meta-language to your liking and not make something so weird you confuse your coworkers --

and then I got to the section on Go and I thought wow! This guy really doesn't get it!

>On average, most shops have average people

Yes, hello, that's me! I don't want to figure out some genius's Lisp code. Instead, Go forces the geniuses to write code that I can understand.

>There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" that captured some of what would give me pause

I think about this a LOT. There is a LOT of this blindness in software philosophical thinking. Just look at FOSS: everyone should be able to view and edit source code. Well that sure made a lot of sense when "everyone" was MIT students because they were Richard Stallman's audience.

But it stops making sense to expect users to inspect source code when users aren't all MIT students. Likewise, use your smart person language on your personal project -- I'm sure it's great. I'll keep using the dumb people language.

And get replaced by an LLM, I guess. But if an LLM can generate Go code (like the author surmises) and not Lisp then it might as well just emit machine code and put us all out of work so I don't know why he thinks Lisp is a moat

I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong.

I don't think a person needs to be a genius to do well in Lisp. As a long-time C and Fortran and Python programmer (and many other languages) it took a long time for me to adjust to the different way of thinking necessitated by Lisp.

Also if Copilot or LLM write Go code, why do we think it can't write Lisp code?

I've dealt with code in many languages that were written by "geniuses" and find that they can be as hard to understand as any Lisp program. Often this depends on the problem being solved. There is a story about Donald Knuth and Edsger Dysktra working on a problem that required no less than four stacks to process. (If memory serves correctly, they found a solution using iteration rather than stacks that was much clearer to understand.)

The solution of Sudoku by Peter Norvig (https://norvig.com/sudoku.html) is a bit of a genius solution but it is written in Python.

It would be a disservice if the article's distinction of smart vs average were to dissuade anyone from learning a new language.

> I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong.

I think it's a misunderstanding. People think that other people are like them (and in particular, think like them).

I think that some languages are a better fit for how some people think. Other languages are a better fit for how other people think. It's not "smart vs. dumb", it's different thinking styles.

Now, if FP (or at least non-procedural) fits your thinking style better, and all you've known is procedural or OO languages, when you run across Lisp it's this amazing, magical experience. You never knew programming could be like this. It's enlightening and freeing. It just fits.

But when you try to tell someone else, and they say, "Eh, Lisp never really clicked for me", you think: "How can it 'not click'? It's this wonderful, magical language!" It's really easy to assume "they're stupid" instead of "they think differently".

One idea of using Lisp is to learn new thinking styles for programming. Thinking styles are not fixed. For example an early hurdle in programming / computer science is recursion. Lisp gave the teachers a tool to teach thinking of software development in terms of programming with recursive functions&datastructures, starting with linked lists and operations for it...

Unfortunately students often got the impression that Lisp is only good for learning new ways of thinking (in combination with a theory of recursive functions) and not for actual software development.

> Lisp being a "language for smart people"

But doesn't autocad have lisp as a language behind the scenes and I would guess that autocad is used by folks who aren't full-time programmers?

Also, I always found a way to use lisp, even when I was CSO. But admittedly these were side projects.

It has a version of lisp behind the scenes. It's not Common Lisp.

>>> There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people"

Boy! Nothing can be further from the truth! At least my experience, trying to teach people to program in java, c, c++, lisp and assembly to both technical and non technical people, the only language that is easy to teach is lisp. By far the only language that everybody “got” and could actually do something on it.

Compare that to c++, where experienced programmers shoot themselves the feet every single day.

I think the essay had less to do with syntax than appreciating what makes lisp special. But sure. I love Lisp's ultra-simple syntax. And it makes macros work, which is indeed a superpower.

You don't need to be too smart to use it effectively.

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