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Comment by ununun | Hacker News Reader

What about Lisps? Also, it would be interesting to read about comparisons between programming languages and naturals ones. What's the most elegant natural language in the world that could be said to be the Scheme of natural languages?

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I was surprised that Common Lisp was not Voldemort. You need something powerful, strange, obsessed with a sort of purity even though it's not so pure itself, and whose name no one dares speak. I guess the C/C++ Voldemort/Snape thing was cool though.

For me, Common Lisp will always be Howl's Moving Castle.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...

Common Lisp: maybe an Animagus, like Sirius Black. Or maybe Alastor Maugrey (Mad Eye), who is quite powerful but is not necessarly attractive.

I'd definitely make Lisp Mad-Eye Moody, terse, and complex, but quite powerful.

I like the Sirius Black comparison. Was influential during the previous generation's rise to power but broken promises (A.I. Winter) forced him to scrape by in the background for a while. Nowadays people who know him realize his power, but to most people he is a shady character from the past.

Classical Chinese.

I checked out Mandarin the other day. Just a little syntax. From what little I saw, the syntax does seem to be more elegant than that of Western ones(the ones I know), but it still is a far cry from Scheme level elegance :)

Salamanca Spanish. Of course, there are 30 dialects of Spanish, many of which are incomprehensible, just like lisp.

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