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Ask HN: What's Your Story with Lisp?

4 points by divyaranjan1905 ↗ HN
As someone who finds LISP and its various flavors very attractive and wants to learn more, as I slowly expand my Emacs init.el, I'd like to know what was your story and journey with LISP. How did you came across it first? By a piece of code, or a book that you were recommended by a friend/teacher? This will also be a source of motivation for me, thank you!

14 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] thread
spindle
I first came across lisp in the 80s, when I briefly worked in AI.

Lisp taught me (this is the motivational bit for you) the power of a few well thought out orthogonal abstractions. Almost all other languages seem to me to be a mixture of leaky, non-orthogonal abstractions.

I've always loved lisp, but since I discovered Smalltalk and Self and Io (a few years later) I've loved those languages even more than Lisp.

So I've found it hard to go back to Lisp.

But actually Lisp is much better than my favourite languages, because there are no implementations of my favourite languages that are really well tied into the unix ecosystem (and the ones that come closest are hobby projects that are full of compiler bugs). So if a paternalistic god would like to tie me down and force me to go back to Lisp, that would probably be a good thing. I would definitely choose Scheme - possibly guile for the minimalism and because Andy Wingo's blog makes my head spin, but probably Racket.

divyaranjan1905
Ah, working in the 80s with Lisp and AI, that's pretty awesome! Thank you for sharing this, but my functional mind would just ask...how have you liked Haskell compared to any of the Lisp(s)?
spindle
To answer your question directly, Haskell is too hard for me :-( I'm a pretty crap programmer - I was a professional back when you didn't have to be GOOD at it, you just had to be able to do it!

More interestingly, I wonder whether Haskell has, or lacks, the careful choice of orthogonal features that I love in a language.

throwaway81523
You might try OCaml. Haskell (like Common Lisp) is more a big soup of features than a carefully chosen orthogonal set. Standard ML (SML) is maybe more orthogonal than OCaml, but less used in practice.
spindle
Interesting - thank you!
gquiniou
I recommend the lectures of "MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation" : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090

it's not strictly about lisp but it's an eye opener to the power of the language

divyaranjan1905
Yep, I'm aware of that course. I was rather interested in looking for personal stories with the language!
abudabi123
also worth seeing is an interview with young John McCarthy on Ai and a three episode series gathering language designers and users at MIT
throwaway81523
Look up "Road to Lisp" for a lot of those stories. I don't know of a similar "Road from Lisp" though ;).
nathants
my story was clojure. came for the immutable data structures, stayed for reagent.

you should learn clojurescript and reagent! it’s very good.

lots of good clojure books to read too.

bitwize
My first exposure to Lisp was via Autolisp in the 80s (on a Tandy 2000!).

When I started getting into Linux and stuff in the mid-90s, I noticed how many programs used some form of Lisp as an extension language -- Emacs, GIMP, Abuse (video game)... Then I stumbled across Guile, the GNU Project's pick for such an extension language in future programs, and tried it out. It felt much more comfortable than Perl for various system tasks. I liked composing a program bit by bit, testing the pieces out in the REPL, which was harder to do with other languages, even Perl.

I've been real into Lisp (esp. Scheme) since then.