[shagie]

In general, I would suggest that conversions to non-LISP languages (and that includes things like Ruby because people say "Ruby is my favorite LISP") makes pedagogical goals of teaching the theory difficult.

When I took my intro class in college, it was taught in Pascal. I had already been programming pascal (as taught by a chemist) in high school for a year or so. The first assignment which was Hello World I didn't even need to wake up in lectures for.

The second assignment... I didn't do quite so well. I had been using global variables and playing fast and loose with scope and passing variable parameters into procedures rather than using a function.

The thing was I already "knew" pascal and I had to unlearn what I knew before I could learn how to write pascal properly.

LISP (and Scheme and Clojure) work well in part because it always forces you to learn new concepts rather than having to unlearn what you did as a hobbiest before taking the class. The LISP family is unlikely to have been the choice language of a high schooler.

---

> But no matter how perfectly suited for the task it is, I won't squint at lines ending in ))))) to try to see that meaning.

When I took an AI class taught in LISP a few years later, the TA sent a joke email about how they had broken into some top secret code only to find it was all written in LISP. Due to the constraints of the mail system there they could only send the last {some number} characters.

))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

[alkonaut]

Yeah that's exactly why (I imagine) the first course in programming I was taught at University was Haskell. All of us who had been programming since age 8 had to reset our brains. A fantastic strategy for a curriculum if you ask me.

Lisp/Scheme/Clojure I'm sure are elegant and great for the same reasons as Haskell. They have unique traits that work well for teaching CS concepts.

I have one single issue: the syntax. I'm not getting past it. I'm 45 years old and have coded since age 8. I have tried and failed to manage learning or reading Lisp many times. I have tried picking up clojure, reading SICP I have had to tinker with AutoCad (AutoLisp) stuff for work. I'm just accepting that I'm not going to enjoy doing anything Lisp-related to the point where I'll ever manage to usefully read SICP, or learn one Lisp-y language to the point where I'd choose it for anything. And frankly it doesn't matter. I just accept it and move on. And I also understand that I can gaze at some Typescript monstrosity with sixteen levels of curly brackets, and while it's terrible syntax, my brain accepts it. But I can only imagine that it's 30 years (or just 1, who knows!) of curly bracket coding that makes my brain able to swallow that. But I'm not ready to invest even a week or two of time in teaching my brain to accept Lisp syntax.

[shagie]

While I had a class in '94 using LISP, it wasn't until dabbling with using "compute pi using pi/4 = 1/1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 ..." as a replacement for FizzBuzz. In 2013 (and I can point to the date) I was also playing with Clojure and wrote:

    (defn pi
      ([] (float (* 4 (pi 1 0.01 0 true))))
      ([term tol accum pn]
        (let
          [t (/ 1 term)
           a ((if pn + -) accum t)]
          (if (< (* 4 t) tol)
            a
            (pi (+ term 2) tol a (not pn))
          )
        )
      )
    )

While I won't claim that that is beautiful Clojure, the `((if pn + -) accum t)` part was a lightbulb moment for me about how LISP and functional programming really worked.

With Java 8 (and beyond) I've become comfortable with passing around functions themselves or creating a Map<String, Function> or having an enum with a function field.

    if (type == enum.FOO) {
      UnaryOperator<String> trim = s -> s.replaceFirst("^0+", "");
      idFun = trim.compose(DTO::getFooNum);
    } else {
      idFun = DTO::getBarNum;
    }

    // ...

    Set<String> ids = results.stream().map(idFun).collect(Collectors.toSet());

As to LISP-ish concepts with {} syntax... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform

    @sorted = map  { $_->[0] }
          sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1]}
          map  { [$_, -s $_] }    # get the size of the file on disk
          @files;

[kazinator]

Oh, newbies can learn Common Lisp badly and have to unlearn. Like, oh, use this let thing rather than introducing variables with setq inside your function, and speaking of which, for proper globals use defvar.

[3836293648]

Are you saying let is bad? Why? Or am I reading you wrong?

I only use elisp though, and not common lisp or clojure