[phoe-krk]

A lot of people, including some prominent faces in the programming world in general, have been writing about Lisp as secret sauce, silver bullet, God's language, source of programming enlightenment, yadda yadda; basically a set of mystic-sounding buzzwords that, other than causing some people to indeed try Lisp, have left a lot of people confused and amused by the wording - or just plain angry and disappointed at the false marketing that I consider the above hyperboles to be.

I can see the benefits of the comments that follow the "any publicity is good publicity" rule. In addition, the more-functional-in-approach Lisp dialects certainly follow the "breaking the long-built mental model" scheme that you mention, and so does Common Lisp, since it mixes programming paradigms (including functional one) rather freely. Still, after seeing the effects of the aforementioned hyperbolization of Lisp in the long run, I'm not convinced that its execution went well at all.

Lisp is a very good language, but no, sorry, it's not the Magical Silver Bullet of Enlightenment™®© that some people like pg or esr or (to some extent) the author of this post claim it to be.

[reikonomusha]

I think it is a silver bullet of enlightenment of a certain understanding of what programming languages are. It is not a silver bullet for all of your programming tasks or problems.

Most people I know who cast off Lisp are people who read the Wikipedia page, didn’t feel enlightened, then began to complain online about how they were disappointed by their Lisp experience. Or perhaps they went a tad further, got upset by Emacs being unfriendly to setup, and proceeded accordingly.

In the Modern Age (TM), programming Lisp is unlikely to convince you to change your usual dev stack to it. But if learned properly, it will enlighten you on the structure of a language and how syntactic malleability is a powerful abstraction for solving many kinds of problems.

Enlightenment usually comes from realizing that it’s not a feature bolted onto Lisp, but an exposed interplay between many otherwise ordinary aspects of programming languages: syntax, semantics, interpretation, and the runtime. At this point one typically “sees” how this interplay could (and perhaps even opaquely does) play out with other, non-Lisp languages.

These kinds of things could in principle be learned in a compiler course, but compiler courses tend to be extraordinarily opaque as to how such a course would help your day-to-day coding. Lisp provides a visceral, hands-on experience of many (though certainly not all) of the same principles.

If you happen to be the kind of programmer who likes absolute control over your environment, because that helps you work through gnarly problems more efficiently than duct taping a bunch of dependencies together, then you may actually end up switching to Lisp.

[cat199]

> syntactic malleability

this is the key point - not quasi/proto FP

most comments I see that are skeptical of the 'lisp as magic' claim seem to focus on the quasi-FP-ability of lisp, leave out the fact that the lisp family is pretty much unique when it comes to symbolic programming, and then optionally go on to talk about how some typed functional non-symbolic language is a better functional language.

this is ignoring the 'too many parens', 'no market share', and 'doesnt work well in my editor' people.

[lisper]

Syntactic malleability is actually a red herring. The key insight of Lisp is: Lisp code is not text. Lisp code can be serialized as text, and it can be parsed from text, but it is not text, it is S-expressions, and S-expressions are not text, they are data structures, specifically, they are trees of cons cells. And because they are trees of cons cells you can construct them without ever constructing any text, i.e. without any parsing.

Syntactic malleability is a consequence of this property of the language. It is not in and of itself the central idea.

[cat199]

good point..

though arguably if code is data we are somewhat saying the same thing :)

in any event, this unique overall property/combination of properties is often overlooked in these discussions

[lisper]

The "code is data" slogan also misses the point. Text is data, so all code is data, whether or not it's Lisp code. (The only code that isn't data is code that has been compiled down to hardware. In the olden days computers were programmed by plugging wires into plugboards. That code wasn't data. But any code that is rendered in the same medium as the data it processes is data, and nowadays that includes all code.)

What matters is that text is structured fundamentally differently from trees of cons cells. Text is a vector of characters. It is a fundamentally flat data structure. It is well suited for humans to read and write with pencil and paper, or chisels and stone tablets. It is not natively suited for describing hierarchies of abstractions, which, it turns out, is what you want when you're writing code.

[earthboundkid]

Never forget: The Y-Combinator is an overly complicated hack that is only necessary because the language lacked a simple way for closures to refer to themselves.

[non-entity]

I tend to joke that lisp is a cult

[phoe-krk]

And this is exactly the result of the aforementioned people actually marketing Lisp as a cult. IMO we can thank these Lisp "evangelists" for greatly contributing to the bad vibe that Lisp dialects have nowadays, along with a few Lisp-using haters such as Erik Naggum who provided the community with as much insight as toxicity.

[reikonomusha]

Erik Naggum has been dead for 11 years. I’m not sure it’s useful to bring up his contributions to the culture if we are discussing what Lisp is today.

[phoe-krk]

He's been dead for a long time, though I've seen his posts being brought up now and then on the Lisp forums. Honestly, I'm thankful that these situations are rare. Most of his Lisp wisdom has been distilled from his other qualities and integrated into many contemporary Lisp libraries. This saves us from the need to dive into the verbatim Naggum posts from the c.l.l archives.

[metroholografix]

That's your opinion and you're welcome to it. I wouldn't use words like 'us', just say 'me'.

I find considerable value in reading Naggum posts verbatim.

[phoe-krk]

Good idea, thanks. The next time I'll replace "us" with "me, and plenty of others".

[reikonomusha]

It maybe had that ethos in its heyday, especially with pg/jwz/c2, but if you for instance join #lisp on Freenode, you’ll find the community is by and large just a bunch of people hacking and collaborating with no evangelical agenda.