[GMoromisato]

Of course you feel this way. You just finished reading SICP or maybe you binged PG essays last weekend. But eventually you'll read Simon Peyton Jones and start screaming about functional programming and algebraic type systems. Then, if you're lucky, you'll get a real job and realize that languages are just a tiny part of software engineering.

I'm excited for you to experience that journey.

[throwaway81523]

Wadler's old article comparing Miranda (a Haskell forebear) to Scheme might be a better place to start.

https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....

[jimbokun]

This was a very pleasant read.

[mindslight]

Do you like Apple ]['s?

You've got a good point. Code generally needs to be read more than it is written. At the very least, you realize this as you try to revisit something you had done previously and are left scratching your head. Encapsulating the complexity in a custom DSL can be great for simplifying all the code you write in the DSL. But it also raises the stakes - if you ever have to revisit the DSL implementation the complexity is there lurking.

[frwrfwrfeefwf]

cute but you don't get lisp yet.

[deterministic]

I would be very interest in seeing how "getting lisp" enables you to write software that is more successful than the C and C++ software that runs the world. Perhaps you have written software in Lisp demonstrating this? Something you can show us?

[__patchbit__]

The reference text on time keeping used to be implemented in Lisp.

Alan Kay says a lot of problems with C/C++ go away when using the higher math more easily expressible in Lisp and like minded languages.

Jürgen Schmidhuber says the problem with computers from a mathematician's point of view are the numbers.

[deterministic]

> Alan Kay says a lot of problems with C/C++ go away when using the higher math more easily expressible in Lisp and like minded languages

That doesn't match my experience at all. Math and numbers are in general not a problem except when (say) implementing triangle hit detection in a game (something I did) where the precision of 32 bit floats does matter.

> Jürgen Schmidhuber says the problem with computers from a mathematician's point of view are the numbers.

That is probably true if you are a mathematician. Most people aren't.

Having said that, LEAN (for example) is written in C++ and used heavily by mathematicians.

[anthk]

Go ate a big lunch from Java, C and a bit of C++ as a systems' language, which Go was designed as "C sucessor without the C++ bullshit". Even the most modern C (Plan9/9front, not what the ANSI C comitee vomits in every iteration) it's a very different beast.

Still, Common Lisp it's in places where trying to build such kind of software in C/C++ would be a reciper for disasters.

https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

[deterministic]

> Common Lisp it's in places where trying to build such kind of software in C/C++ would be a reciper for disasters.

I personally never blame the tools. I have written fairly complex software in 68000 assembler and it (1) worked fine and (2) was highly maintainable. However it was of course much slower to modify than using a higher level language.

[anthk]

M68k asm can be easier than some C++ templates.

[jake_and_fatman]

I see what you did there.

"Of course that's your contention. You just got finished readin' some Marxian historian -- Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when you get to James Lemon, and then you're gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." Good Will Hunting (1997)