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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe. From that perspective it's kind of hard not to be a little condescending toward fans of other languages.

It doesn't help that younger programmers today who complain about "too many parentheses" are largely unaware that Lisp was the original language of AI because the guy who invented AI also invented Lisp to help him do AI. I for one am just a tiny bit chuffed about that because I'm certain that more and better progress on LLMs (and beyond) would have happened had Lisp been used instead of Python as the primary vehicle for AI exploration.

So yeah, I damn well consider myself elite and I won't apologize for it.

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I haven't seen a https://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie in the wild for a very long time. I thought they'd all gone extinct!

There's dozens of us! Dozens! /s

(and all self-aware)

> Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe.

Could it be a form of self-selection bias? That the kind of person that is likely to have such thoughts about a (family of) programming language is also more likely to start and preservere with Lisp?

That quote is referring to Lisp’s foundations being essentially a mathematical model that is equivalent to the lambda calculus, which can be shown to be capable of expressing any computation possible. It’s a parallel to the Turing machine, see the Church-Turing Thesis. This makes the language, like mathematics, feel less invented by a human and more like discovered, as if it was some law of the universe.

https://xkcd.com/224/

> I for one am just a tiny bit chuffed about that because I'm certain that more and better progress on LLMs (and beyond) would have happened had Lisp been used instead of Python as the primary vehicle for AI exploration.

Yeah… clearly “not using lisp enough” was the major bottleneck in AI development over the last 40 years. /s

(While we’re patting ourselves on the backs for no reason, I’m certain that modern AI is as big of an argument for worse is better as C and Unix ever were.)

> Lisp was the original language of AI

Ahhh so that's why the AI winter happened? Wrong programming language? /s

I am pretty sure that if they had GPUs capable of doing billions of computations in parallel in the 80’s, Lisp generation would have invented LLMs first.

Yes, because lisp language and thinking maps so well to GPUs. /s

Politics.

Just like with the previous AI Winter.

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