[kazinator]

How we can summarize the situation is this: Lisp has patterns, but you don't need a book to give you copy-paste boiler plate.

E.g. Visitor Pattern.

Lisp programmer be like: I'm a gonna recursively walk this tree of objects, and call a generic function with each object from the tree as one argument, and one specific object as the other argument. Done!

C++/Java programmer be like: I'm gonna study the Visitor Pattern again, and then prepare a bunch of skeleton code ...

[dingosity]

Turns out Lisp has different patterns than C++. Who knew?

[kazinator]

It's the same pattern. It just doesn't need an elaborate coding recipe from an instruction book. The essence of the pattern is there, but since the boilerplate is all gone it's almost unrecognizable.