Tag: philosophy

It is true what people say about Lisp, it changes how you think. In particular, it changes how you think about yourself!
If you pursue the “Road to Lisp”, it will serve as an elucidative experience as to whether or not you are “good” at programming. You see, I used to confuse “doing” with “learning”. All the “greats” tell you to learn a new language each year, but they don’t really tell you why, just that something good will happen. Now I can tell you from experience that I have had great fun and learned a lot jumping from language to language, but that strategy for learning is poor use of time and you’ll probably just end up being an average programmer in more languages after it is all said and done. There are better, much better ways to study the fundamentals of programming.
Lisp is one of those ways.

For many years I sought “the perfect programming language”. Traveling aim-fully from language to language, I found that there are a number of aspects to enjoy when it comes to a particular programming language, but I never found one that was “just right”.
During that journey, I started out as a slave to syntax. I had to “like” the syntax. Even when I found a syntax I liked, I would find that the language would be too narrowly-focused. Most general-purpose languages force you to shoe-horn your solution to a problem into how the language creator wants you to solve it. Most programmers hate being forced to do anything; especially how to think.
Eventually I realized that there is no “perfect programming language”. Perhaps, though, there is a language that is “good enough”.
A lot of folks love the programming language Lisp. It provides all of the core language features you could ever need. On top of that, it lets you tailor the syntax to your pleasure.
From what I know about Lisp, it is “good enough”, and in the world programming languages, that is probably just about the best compliment you could give any language.