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by oersted 625 days ago
Honestly, to me that sounds like a red flag. There are already too many temptations to get on a purist mood and spend ages thinking about elegant code structure.

I know, it's ambiguous, "more time thinking than typing" might imply that you spend more time thinking about the core problem you are solving. But let's be real, it's Lisp, you are thinking about how to model your problem elegantly in Lisp, not about how to solve it.

This is incidental complexity, you might feel mightily smart and productive, but you are really not getting anything substantial done. Clean code is critical, but in moderation, you need to constantly prevent it from upstaging the actual problem you are working on.

2 comments

Part of the Common Lisp experience is tool building at the language level.

You could be digging a hole with your hands. But thinking a moment, somebody came up with the idea of a shovel. That made a huge difference.

Similar, tool building & usage at the language level can also make a huge difference. In larger applications this makes code much more compact and makes a person more productive.

> But let's be real, it's Lisp, you are thinking about how to model your problem elegantly in Lisp, not about how to solve it.

But let's be real, it's Java, you are thinking about how to model your problem as a class structure in Java, not about how to solve it.