Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap.
It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:
1) Have tried lisp and clojure
2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness
3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises
4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.
The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.
The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers.
The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem.
"Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations where a large portion of your time is spent reading code written by people you've never met who may not have known what they were doing.
Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. Golang enforces uniform styles so that you don't have idiosyncratic teams doing their own things. Bazel is a largely language agnostic build system, with amazing build farm support. Apple and Google have both contributed heavily to sanitizers and standard library hardening in order to detect/eliminate issues without reading the code. Facebook has poured vast resources into automatic static analysis. AWS built an entire organization around treating all their internal interfaces the same as external ones.
Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript.
Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.
Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.
"It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:
1) Have tried lisp and clojure
2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness
3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises
4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world."
This is me to a T — even when I'm building hobby projects. The point of writing any code, for me, is most of all to see a certain idea to fruition, so I choose what will make me most productive getting where I want to go. And while I still worship at the altar of Common Lisp as an incredibly good language, the language matters much less than the libraries, ecosystem, and documentation for productivity (or even effective DSL style abstraction level!), so eventually I have had to make my peace with Python, TypeScript, and Rust.
I think the missing piece is that "more expressive" languages do not automatically create more value at the team or company level.
Languages like Lisp, Clojure, Rust, Haskell, Erlang give strong engineers room to build powerful abstractions, but they also increase cognitive load and ramp up cost. In most orgs with churn and constant hiring, you do not get to enjoy "we built great abstractions and now we are fast". You live in "someone new is trying to understand what the last person did".
That is why hand holding and guard rails win. Not because Python or similar are technically superior, but because they support a commoditised, fungible workforce. Even if a wizard in a high dimension language is 2x more productive, that does not necessarily beat a slightly larger team in a mainstream language once you factor in turnover and ramp up. Companies mostly optimise for business impact, predictable delivery, and ease of staffing, not for maximising the ceiling of the top few programmers.
That said, at the individual level, as a programmer, you definitely can benefit from learning and mastering those added dimensions, even if you are to never use them again professionally, they expand your mindset.
There are several languages that I could use and be economically successful with, but I refuse to use because I consider them to be poorly designed.
Using a bad language for 8 hours a day makes me irritable and it's impossible to prevent that irritability from overflowing into my interactions with other people. I'd rather that my conversations with the computer be joyful ones.
Most of the time when someone adds these fancy languages what happens is that they leave and the ones left are the ones that have to deal with the shit that was produced.
I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolutely no good reason, i try to kill it as fast as possible.
I don't want to be the victim of this code in the future or have my team bear the cost of maintaining stuff they don't understand.
yes. and as a long time lisper, i don't think that it's the macros.
i think lisp's magic is a lot more cultural than most people think. i.e. how lispnicks implement lisps and the ecosystem around it. how easy it is to walk the entire ladder of abstractions from machine code to project specific DSL's. how pluggable its parsing pipeline is -- something that is not even exposed in most languages, let alone customizable.
the language, the foundation, of course matters. but i think to a lesser extent than what people think. (hence the trend of trying to hire lispnicks to hard, but non-lisp positions?)
and it's not even an obviously good culture... (just how abrasive common lispers are? need to have a thick skin if you ask a stupid question... or that grumpy, pervasive spirit of the lone wolf...?)
maybe it's just a peculiar filter that gets together peculiar people who think and write code in peculiar ways.
maybe it's not the macros, but the patterns in personality traits of the people who end up at lisp?
While what you say is true (I’ve used Lisps for 40 years and here I am writing Rust), the people who consciously make that choice are a tiny niche. There are vastly more people who don’t and can’t make that choice because they don’t have 1-3. So the empirical evidence for what’s actually critical is pretty slim.
> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.
The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really about Clojure or lisp.
Big lisp guy here. Have written tens of thousands of lines of scheme, at least, and common lisp.
But I don't get this "Lisp is so much better than everything else," thing. It feels very jejune to me.
Most lisp programmers barely use macros and most programming languages these days have most of the features of Lisp that originally made it useful (automatic memory management, repls, dynamic typing*, and even meta-programming if you really want it).
I do think that most common languages are mediocre but mediocrity is just how humans are.
--
If I had one thing I want fixed about Scheme it would be the dynamic typing, especially since many Schemes compile aggressively. Finding bugs is much harder when your apparently dynamic language has compiled out everything useful for understanding an error condition. Most of those mistakes could be caught at compile time.
> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension.
Show me. Specifically, material outcomes that I will care about.
There are quite a few programmers who say lisp led to early retirement. That was a pretty interesting idea to me. I like going to the beach a lot.
I am not so sure about people who don’t want to get done: if you like doing what the ticket says instead of the other way around lisp probably isn’t going to be something you’re interested in.
Serialization & deserialization, for instance. Macros are great for generating ser/de hooks automatically.
Thing is, other languages do this with metaprogramming or explicit codegen. Everyone needs metaprogramming sometimes—that's why everything supports it, actually.
Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.
The sketch here would be that Lisps used to be exceptionally resource-intensive, allowing closer-to-metal languages to proliferate and become the default. But nowadays even Common Lisp is a simple and lightweight language next to say Python or C++. Still it's hard to overcome the inertia of the past's massive investments in education in less abstraction-friendly languages.
I take Lisp more like artisanal work. It actually requires more skill and attention to use, but in good hands it can let someone really deliver a lot quickly.
That said, like in anything else, this kind of craftsmanship doesn't translate to monetization and scale the markets demands. What markets want is to lower barrier for entry, templatize, cheapen things, and so on.
It's normal then that languages optimized for the lowest common denominator, with less expressive power and more hand holding have won in popularity in enterprise and such, where making money is the goal, but that Lisp remains a strong and popular language for the enthousiasts looking to level up their craft or just geek out.
I've been using emacs and have written a a few thousand lines of elisp. I like elisp. I generally like any language that I become proficient in. But lisp isn't some sort of magical hammer that turns everyone into 10x programmers.
Maybe I still haven't had my epiphany, but I'm not a huge fan of macros in lisps and DSLs (like what ruby is known for). It makes code harder to understand.
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
Homoiconicity is overrated. Python is an acceptable lisp: higher order functions, dynamic types, generators, decorators.
If you really need syntactic transformation you can use the ast module.
IMO, Python was an acceptable lisp even before it grew generators and decorators.
True lisp adherents view lack of differentiating syntax as an unalloyed good, but that cuts against the grain of how humans have communicated with each other for millennia.
You'd think the current crop of people who grew up texting each other without syntax might be a better fit for it, but then you run smack dab into the fact that the minimal required syntax is, in fact, actually required, and very important, to boot.
Robust macros allow you to create domain-specific abstractions. That's cool, but there are plenty of other ways. Even functions are a way to create abstractions. And with anonymous functions, you can easily create higher-order abstractions.
The only thing AST-level macros help with is creating custom syntax to cut down on boilerplate. That's very cool, but it comes with a cost: now you have to learn new syntax.
I love Lisp. I've written tiny Lisp interpreters for most of my games (Chron X, Transcendence) and even GridWhale started out with a Lisp-like language.
In my experience, Lisp is great when you have a single programmer who understands and controls the whole source tree. Once a program exceeds the capacity of a single programmer, more conventional languages work better.
I’m writing a lot of Rust lately, which is rapidly becoming regarded as a conventional language, and I sure do appreciate all those things I use every day that end in exclamation points.
In the pro-macro camp, if languages like JS had macros, the language could be kept much simpler, leaving things like pipeline operators, async / await, etc to developers.
In the anti-macro camp, they’re hard to write, reason about, and debug stack traces. They are also tempting to use when you shouldn’t, and I think a lot of software shops would run into trouble with them.
Regarding Clojure, I wouldn’t call Clojure a write-only language, but I did find that my Clojure code was more inscrutable than my code in other languages— roughly as inscrutable as my Haskell code. Something about it makes me want to code-golf my way into tiny little clever solutions.
Also, I’ve been burnt by various pitfalls of dynamically typed languages— upgrading dependencies in large dynamically typed projects, etc. I’ll take static types over macros any time.
Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.
These days, most of my work is in TypeScript, and it’s just fine. Not perfect, but fine. I haven’t missed macros much.
All that said, I do like Clojure. I miss the baked in immutability, the ability to omit commas in arrays / lists / maps / etc, keywords, and the threading macros.
In summary, some of us have given it a shot, and ended up choosing a different path, and that’s ok.
> Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.
Why is that? Never understood the complaint about slow Clojure startup time. Usually the context is either your local development environment, where you start the process once until you're done for the day, or you're deploying on a server and 5 seconds vs 10 seconds doesn't make that big of an impact. Short-lived CLIs aren't really suitable for Clojure in the first place, you'd use something like Babashka for that.
So why is the "slow startup" actually a problem? I don't seem to hit that issue ever myself, wondering what kind of situation people find themselves at where this hurts.
A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness.
This is a profound misapprehension of the nature of language design. Languages exist within contexts, and embody tradeoffs. It is possible- common, even- to fully grasp the capabilities of a language like lisp and still find it inappropriate or undesirable for a given task. Pick any given context- safety-critical medical applications, constrained programming for microcontrollers or GPUs, livecoding environments where saving keystrokes is king- and you can find specialized languages with novel tools, execution models, and affordances. Perhaps it never crossed Paul Graham's mind that lisp itself might be a "blub" to others, in other situations.
The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.
> The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.
100% this. I think you can replace "languages" in that sentence with many things (employee levels is another big one that is relevant to this forum - employee value comes in many, many shapes). Reducing complicated things to one dimension can be a useful shortcut in a pinch, but it's rarely the best way to make complicated choices among things.
It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions.
Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp.
Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.
In the absence of that, the entire article can be refuted by quoting The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
“Common, even”? Citation needed. I’ve worked closely with hundreds of developers over the years and maybe two of them made a conscious, knowledgeable choice whether to use Lisp for something.
You’re even sort of making the same point. Specialized problems need specialized tools. How do you write those specialized tools? Start from scratch, or just make a Lisp package?
"Lisp/Clojure macros derive from the uniformity of the language to enable composing the language back on itself. Logic can be run at compile-time no differently than at runtime using all the same functions and techniques. The syntax tree of the language can be manipulated and transformed at will, enabling control over the semantics of code itself. "
If you are a smaller consultancy solving hard problems, then you might need this.
The problem sometimes is: "I don't want this level of complication, especially when I am going to hand it off to other people to maintain it."
In the business world, you are not gated by your intelligence, but by the average IQ of the people who are going to maintain it over the years.
Macros can be very powerful. But! They are like DSLs, in that they create their own mini language that you have to learn. Arguably worse than DSLs, macros modify the context of the host language in which they are invoked. That is their power, but it's also what distinguishes them from regular library functions, whose interface semantics are generally simpler to reason about.
Macros are preferable to runtime reflection and monkey patching, but the compile-time reflection and monkey-patching represented by macros still incurs a complexity tax that needs to be weighed against the alternative of non-macro code.
As others have said, the lack of any examples makes this post fall flat.
Also, consider that good work - particularly in art but also in engineering - requires constraints. Knowing what you cannot do adds guard rails and a base set of axioms around which you can build. Perhaps the power of LISP macros and AST manipulation is not “powerful and thus good”, but rather “too powerful and thus complicated”. Needing to write out a boring old function/class/module instead might leave you with code that is simpler to read and design around.
Alan Kay said something similar back in the 90s, framing it as ants living on the "pink plane" and the "blue plane". What he said at the time was an ant crawling on the pink plane can do a lot of pink plane things, but he won't think about the kinds of things he can do on the orthogonal blue plane, because he's never been there so he doesn't have those thoughts. Innovation in PLs comes when someone from the pink plane travels to the blue plane and brings back all they have seen, which causes people in the pink plane to start thinking new (bluer) thoughts.
I'm going to use a metaphor for this talk which is drawn from a wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. One of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be.—Learning.—He realized that learning, of course, is an act of creation itself, because something happens in you that wasn't there before. He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about. Creative acts, generally, are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. He says, every once in a while, even though you have been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea. Maybe when you're taking a shower. Maybe when you're out jogging. Maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment, suddenly, that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at, appears to you in a completely different light, as though it were something else.
> A big chunk of our code was doing things that are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software did things our competitors’ software couldn’t do.
I've never seen a general purpose programming language that couldn't do everything the underlying hardware is capable of. It could only be unperformant enough that you could call it unfeasible at worst. What's so hard to do in languages other than Lisp? Spam parentheses?
> Many point to “ecosystems” as the barrier, an argument that’s valid for Common Lisp but not for Clojure, which interops easily with one of the largest ecosystems in existence. So many misperceptions dominate, especially the reflexive reaction that the parentheses are “weird”. Most importantly, you almost never see these perceived costs weighed against Clojure’s huge benefits. Macros are the focus of this post, but Clojure’s approach to state and identity is also transformative. The scale of the advantages of Clojure dwarfs the scale of adoption.
> In that essay Paul Graham introduced the “blub paradox” as an explanation for this disconnect. It’s a great metaphor I’ve referenced many times over the years. This post is my take on explaining this disconnect from another angle that complements the blub paradox.
The blub paradox, and the author's "flatland" methaphors, function as thought-terminating cliches. They provide the author (and Lisp proponents) with a simple explanation ("Everyone else is stupid") that doesn't force them to reconcile with more difficult questions ("Is it possible that other intelligent people have considered Lisp and rejected it for good reasons?")
And, honestly, it's just an annoying line of reasoning to hear that the only reason <you> don't use <favorite technology> is because you're just not perceptive enough.
For instance, the suggestion that "ecosystem" problems are "misconceptions" that critics fail to reconcile seems inaccurate to me. Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems. Do you think these problems meant nothing to everyone who decided against Clojure? Or do they all live in Flatland?
> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension.
There are many such "new dimensions of programming". Macros are cool, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between a proper macro system or a proper type system, I know which one I'm choosing every time.
In reality, most people, intelligent though they may be, don’t consider and reject Lisp, so that argument doesn’t really work. I know it irritates people who actually do consider and reject Lisp, but those people don’t realize that they’re a tiny elite who are not the target of these essays.
There are plenty of reasons it might be better not to use Lisp, but very few people actually get as far as considering them.
>Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems.
The irony is Clojure(script) has all those things. By virtue of being hosted on the JVM and Javacript and having first class interop with both. ClojureCLR even gives you access to all of C# etc.
Being hosted was a great play in terms of ecosystem.
The power of macros is somewhat overblown and not at all hard to explain.
Consider e.g. the "with" statement in Python[1]. Someone came up with the idea, found a way to integrate it into python and a year later, people could use it. In Lisp, you write a macro.
Now Python is a rather agile language as these things go. In other languages it would be a lot more than a year. When I was in college, my professor wanted us to use generics, but the school mandated language, Java, lacked generics at the time. So we were told to use a fork of javac that had generics added. Pretty much none of the development tools would play nicely with this, and javac was at least two orders of magnitude slower at compiling than my preferred java compiler at the time (jikes).
None of this is world-ending, but it really is annoying. The argument for macros is just "what is the next generics/with/whatever feature that your language is missing." Most of the features that lisp programmers use macros for have made it into modern languages that continue to evolve, so the leverage narrows. In the late '90s it was probably a much bigger multiplier than today.
I use both approaches. One thing is that Clojure code bases are comically hard for anyone to mentally parse if they didn't write it. At least the bulk of programmers... like you'll find on an actual team. Great to write, sure, but not useful in terms of onboarding new team members. Clojure programmers are typically great thinkers. And veterans. But if you are actually trying to build a company, then beware. Your handful of expensive brilliant programmers will build something that you can't bring people in to expand or maintain. Also watch out for the fact that the companies making the awesome tools that COULD be used by noobs often keep them closed source (Datomic and, I think here, Rama). They intend for you to hire them as consultants and pay licenses. Which is all fine... except the 2D languages have real open source libraries with huge adoption and ecosystems.
I'm not sure I'd call a programmer "brilliant" if they cannot A) make a codebase simple enough for people to contribute to and B) handle the social parts of training someone to get good enough to contribute to the codebase.
it'd be nice if there was an attempt to give an example of what kind of powers moving into 3d-lispland allows instead of just saying that it's beyond the comprehension of the 2d-planar programmers.
because, i guarantee that it's not beyond our comprehension. at some point the author was a 2d-er that read/did something and had their understanding expanded. so... do that for us
I had heard before that Lisp had something called "macros", but I didn't know exactly what they were or how they differed from C macros. This blog post kind of explains that, but not in a way that couldn't also apply to C macros if you tried hard enough.
I want to know more, but I didn't have any examples here to look at. I may look them up now that I have an idea.
Let say.. I remember quite well when I learned Lisp, and differently to any other language I learned, it gave me profound insights and even more profound frustration trying to understand some concepts.
I remember playing with call with cc, or creating a flow programming language, thinking in higher order, etc..
I clearly do not want to work with lisp, and many of those concepts can be used in other languages without too much effort now (lambdas, map, filter, reduce,... Among the most common and useful).
I think learning lisp is nice as it helps explore interesting areas of programming on a mental level. I can't stress enough how it can wrap your mind sometimes.
Will it help you program faster and bug free? Probably not, will it improve your mental model of programming languages, probably. Will you enjoy learning abstract things, if you like solving math puzzles, probably, otherwise probably not.
It's hard to express the 'powers' it gives you, it's like spending much time thinking about simple things that usually you just use without thinking about.
As a crude example, the scope of a variable shared between two lambda function that is not shared with the global space.
Sorry that I don't have a specific example in mind, I feel like the 'power' is just spending enough time thinking on complex things.
I agree. Especially as someone that likes LISP-like languages and uses Janet and Fennel quite a bit (and some elisp, in the past also Clojure) but never used a macro for anything. Would love to hear more about that third dimension I am missing out on.
> Learning new dimensions
> You can’t persuade someone in 2D with 3D arguments. This is exactly like how in Flatland the sphere is unable to get the square to comprehend what “up” and “down” mean.
Just like today's UX designers who need a 3D surface to draw a lousy rectangle.
libraryofbabel|2 months ago
It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:
1) Have tried lisp and clojure
2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness
3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises
4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.
The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.
AlotOfReading|2 months ago
The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem.
"Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations where a large portion of your time is spent reading code written by people you've never met who may not have known what they were doing.
Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. Golang enforces uniform styles so that you don't have idiosyncratic teams doing their own things. Bazel is a largely language agnostic build system, with amazing build farm support. Apple and Google have both contributed heavily to sanitizers and standard library hardening in order to detect/eliminate issues without reading the code. Facebook has poured vast resources into automatic static analysis. AWS built an entire organization around treating all their internal interfaces the same as external ones.
nine_k|2 months ago
Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.
Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.
logicprog|2 months ago
1) Have tried lisp and clojure
2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness
3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises
4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world."
This is me to a T — even when I'm building hobby projects. The point of writing any code, for me, is most of all to see a certain idea to fruition, so I choose what will make me most productive getting where I want to go. And while I still worship at the altar of Common Lisp as an incredibly good language, the language matters much less than the libraries, ecosystem, and documentation for productivity (or even effective DSL style abstraction level!), so eventually I have had to make my peace with Python, TypeScript, and Rust.
didibus|2 months ago
Languages like Lisp, Clojure, Rust, Haskell, Erlang give strong engineers room to build powerful abstractions, but they also increase cognitive load and ramp up cost. In most orgs with churn and constant hiring, you do not get to enjoy "we built great abstractions and now we are fast". You live in "someone new is trying to understand what the last person did".
That is why hand holding and guard rails win. Not because Python or similar are technically superior, but because they support a commoditised, fungible workforce. Even if a wizard in a high dimension language is 2x more productive, that does not necessarily beat a slightly larger team in a mainstream language once you factor in turnover and ramp up. Companies mostly optimise for business impact, predictable delivery, and ease of staffing, not for maximising the ceiling of the top few programmers.
That said, at the individual level, as a programmer, you definitely can benefit from learning and mastering those added dimensions, even if you are to never use them again professionally, they expand your mindset.
zarzavat|2 months ago
Using a bad language for 8 hours a day makes me irritable and it's impossible to prevent that irritability from overflowing into my interactions with other people. I'd rather that my conversations with the computer be joyful ones.
mlinhares|2 months ago
I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolutely no good reason, i try to kill it as fast as possible.
I don't want to be the victim of this code in the future or have my team bear the cost of maintaining stuff they don't understand.
miohtama|2 months ago
Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.
attila-lendvai|2 months ago
i think lisp's magic is a lot more cultural than most people think. i.e. how lispnicks implement lisps and the ecosystem around it. how easy it is to walk the entire ladder of abstractions from machine code to project specific DSL's. how pluggable its parsing pipeline is -- something that is not even exposed in most languages, let alone customizable.
the language, the foundation, of course matters. but i think to a lesser extent than what people think. (hence the trend of trying to hire lispnicks to hard, but non-lisp positions?)
and it's not even an obviously good culture... (just how abrasive common lispers are? need to have a thick skin if you ask a stupid question... or that grumpy, pervasive spirit of the lone wolf...?)
maybe it's just a peculiar filter that gets together peculiar people who think and write code in peculiar ways.
maybe it's not the macros, but the patterns in personality traits of the people who end up at lisp?
wrs|2 months ago
ModernMech|2 months ago
The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really about Clojure or lisp.
anthk|2 months ago
zahlman|2 months ago
Xmd5a|2 months ago
You mean another slick text editor :/
throw__away7391|2 months ago
somewhereoutth|2 months ago
nathan_compton|2 months ago
But I don't get this "Lisp is so much better than everything else," thing. It feels very jejune to me.
Most lisp programmers barely use macros and most programming languages these days have most of the features of Lisp that originally made it useful (automatic memory management, repls, dynamic typing*, and even meta-programming if you really want it).
I do think that most common languages are mediocre but mediocrity is just how humans are.
--
If I had one thing I want fixed about Scheme it would be the dynamic typing, especially since many Schemes compile aggressively. Finding bugs is much harder when your apparently dynamic language has compiled out everything useful for understanding an error condition. Most of those mistakes could be caught at compile time.
antonvs|2 months ago
The ML family or Haskell fit that bill. Both OCaml and Haskell also have an equivalent of macro systems. So does e.g. Rust, for that matter.
I agree with your main point. The attitude you’re referring to is largely a relic of a previous era, at this point.
hashmap|2 months ago
Show me. Specifically, material outcomes that I will care about.
geocar|2 months ago
There are quite a few programmers who say lisp led to early retirement. That was a pretty interesting idea to me. I like going to the beach a lot.
I am not so sure about people who don’t want to get done: if you like doing what the ticket says instead of the other way around lisp probably isn’t going to be something you’re interested in.
bccdee|2 months ago
Thing is, other languages do this with metaprogramming or explicit codegen. Everyone needs metaprogramming sometimes—that's why everything supports it, actually.
chromaton|2 months ago
tikhonj|2 months ago
That is a big assumption about the way popularity contests work.
ruricolist|2 months ago
didibus|2 months ago
That said, like in anything else, this kind of craftsmanship doesn't translate to monetization and scale the markets demands. What markets want is to lower barrier for entry, templatize, cheapen things, and so on.
It's normal then that languages optimized for the lowest common denominator, with less expressive power and more hand holding have won in popularity in enterprise and such, where making money is the goal, but that Lisp remains a strong and popular language for the enthousiasts looking to level up their craft or just geek out.
xigoi|2 months ago
attila-lendvai|2 months ago
tra3|2 months ago
Maybe I still haven't had my epiphany, but I'm not a huge fan of macros in lisps and DSLs (like what ruby is known for). It makes code harder to understand.
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
didibus|2 months ago
Lisps are a continuum, and I still think there's room for new ones that are even better.
drivebyhooting|2 months ago
zephen|2 months ago
True lisp adherents view lack of differentiating syntax as an unalloyed good, but that cuts against the grain of how humans have communicated with each other for millennia.
You'd think the current crop of people who grew up texting each other without syntax might be a better fit for it, but then you run smack dab into the fact that the minimal required syntax is, in fact, actually required, and very important, to boot.
GMoromisato|2 months ago
The only thing AST-level macros help with is creating custom syntax to cut down on boilerplate. That's very cool, but it comes with a cost: now you have to learn new syntax.
I love Lisp. I've written tiny Lisp interpreters for most of my games (Chron X, Transcendence) and even GridWhale started out with a Lisp-like language.
In my experience, Lisp is great when you have a single programmer who understands and controls the whole source tree. Once a program exceeds the capacity of a single programmer, more conventional languages work better.
wrs|2 months ago
christophilus|2 months ago
In the anti-macro camp, they’re hard to write, reason about, and debug stack traces. They are also tempting to use when you shouldn’t, and I think a lot of software shops would run into trouble with them.
Regarding Clojure, I wouldn’t call Clojure a write-only language, but I did find that my Clojure code was more inscrutable than my code in other languages— roughly as inscrutable as my Haskell code. Something about it makes me want to code-golf my way into tiny little clever solutions.
Also, I’ve been burnt by various pitfalls of dynamically typed languages— upgrading dependencies in large dynamically typed projects, etc. I’ll take static types over macros any time.
Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.
These days, most of my work is in TypeScript, and it’s just fine. Not perfect, but fine. I haven’t missed macros much.
All that said, I do like Clojure. I miss the baked in immutability, the ability to omit commas in arrays / lists / maps / etc, keywords, and the threading macros.
In summary, some of us have given it a shot, and ended up choosing a different path, and that’s ok.
embedding-shape|2 months ago
Why is that? Never understood the complaint about slow Clojure startup time. Usually the context is either your local development environment, where you start the process once until you're done for the day, or you're deploying on a server and 5 seconds vs 10 seconds doesn't make that big of an impact. Short-lived CLIs aren't really suitable for Clojure in the first place, you'd use something like Babashka for that.
So why is the "slow startup" actually a problem? I don't seem to hit that issue ever myself, wondering what kind of situation people find themselves at where this hurts.
RodgerTheGreat|2 months ago
This is a profound misapprehension of the nature of language design. Languages exist within contexts, and embody tradeoffs. It is possible- common, even- to fully grasp the capabilities of a language like lisp and still find it inappropriate or undesirable for a given task. Pick any given context- safety-critical medical applications, constrained programming for microcontrollers or GPUs, livecoding environments where saving keystrokes is king- and you can find specialized languages with novel tools, execution models, and affordances. Perhaps it never crossed Paul Graham's mind that lisp itself might be a "blub" to others, in other situations.
The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.
rented_mule|2 months ago
100% this. I think you can replace "languages" in that sentence with many things (employee levels is another big one that is relevant to this forum - employee value comes in many, many shapes). Reducing complicated things to one dimension can be a useful shortcut in a pinch, but it's rarely the best way to make complicated choices among things.
chihuahua|2 months ago
Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp.
Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.
In the absence of that, the entire article can be refuted by quoting The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
wrs|2 months ago
You’re even sort of making the same point. Specialized problems need specialized tools. How do you write those specialized tools? Start from scratch, or just make a Lisp package?
anthk|2 months ago
shrubble|2 months ago
"Lisp/Clojure macros derive from the uniformity of the language to enable composing the language back on itself. Logic can be run at compile-time no differently than at runtime using all the same functions and techniques. The syntax tree of the language can be manipulated and transformed at will, enabling control over the semantics of code itself. "
If you are a smaller consultancy solving hard problems, then you might need this.
The problem sometimes is: "I don't want this level of complication, especially when I am going to hand it off to other people to maintain it."
In the business world, you are not gated by your intelligence, but by the average IQ of the people who are going to maintain it over the years.
layer8|2 months ago
Macros are preferable to runtime reflection and monkey patching, but the compile-time reflection and monkey-patching represented by macros still incurs a complexity tax that needs to be weighed against the alternative of non-macro code.
teaearlgraycold|2 months ago
Also, consider that good work - particularly in art but also in engineering - requires constraints. Knowing what you cannot do adds guard rails and a base set of axioms around which you can build. Perhaps the power of LISP macros and AST manipulation is not “powerful and thus good”, but rather “too powerful and thus complicated”. Needing to write out a boring old function/class/module instead might leave you with code that is simpler to read and design around.
ModernMech|2 months ago
hu3|2 months ago
Cross-pollination between programming languages is a good thing.
willrshansen|2 months ago
NooneAtAll3|2 months ago
moffkalast|2 months ago
I've never seen a general purpose programming language that couldn't do everything the underlying hardware is capable of. It could only be unperformant enough that you could call it unfeasible at worst. What's so hard to do in languages other than Lisp? Spam parentheses?
johnfn|2 months ago
> In that essay Paul Graham introduced the “blub paradox” as an explanation for this disconnect. It’s a great metaphor I’ve referenced many times over the years. This post is my take on explaining this disconnect from another angle that complements the blub paradox.
The blub paradox, and the author's "flatland" methaphors, function as thought-terminating cliches. They provide the author (and Lisp proponents) with a simple explanation ("Everyone else is stupid") that doesn't force them to reconcile with more difficult questions ("Is it possible that other intelligent people have considered Lisp and rejected it for good reasons?")
And, honestly, it's just an annoying line of reasoning to hear that the only reason <you> don't use <favorite technology> is because you're just not perceptive enough.
For instance, the suggestion that "ecosystem" problems are "misconceptions" that critics fail to reconcile seems inaccurate to me. Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems. Do you think these problems meant nothing to everyone who decided against Clojure? Or do they all live in Flatland?
> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension.
There are many such "new dimensions of programming". Macros are cool, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between a proper macro system or a proper type system, I know which one I'm choosing every time.
wrs|2 months ago
There are plenty of reasons it might be better not to use Lisp, but very few people actually get as far as considering them.
andersmurphy|2 months ago
The irony is Clojure(script) has all those things. By virtue of being hosted on the JVM and Javacript and having first class interop with both. ClojureCLR even gives you access to all of C# etc.
Being hosted was a great play in terms of ecosystem.
What it doesn't have is ALGOL style syntax.
aidenn0|2 months ago
Consider e.g. the "with" statement in Python[1]. Someone came up with the idea, found a way to integrate it into python and a year later, people could use it. In Lisp, you write a macro.
Now Python is a rather agile language as these things go. In other languages it would be a lot more than a year. When I was in college, my professor wanted us to use generics, but the school mandated language, Java, lacked generics at the time. So we were told to use a fork of javac that had generics added. Pretty much none of the development tools would play nicely with this, and javac was at least two orders of magnitude slower at compiling than my preferred java compiler at the time (jikes).
None of this is world-ending, but it really is annoying. The argument for macros is just "what is the next generics/with/whatever feature that your language is missing." Most of the features that lisp programmers use macros for have made it into modern languages that continue to evolve, so the leverage narrows. In the late '90s it was probably a much bigger multiplier than today.
1: https://peps.python.org/pep-0343/
joeevans1000|2 months ago
embedding-shape|2 months ago
parpfish|2 months ago
because, i guarantee that it's not beyond our comprehension. at some point the author was a 2d-er that read/did something and had their understanding expanded. so... do that for us
Sophira|2 months ago
I had heard before that Lisp had something called "macros", but I didn't know exactly what they were or how they differed from C macros. This blog post kind of explains that, but not in a way that couldn't also apply to C macros if you tried hard enough.
I want to know more, but I didn't have any examples here to look at. I may look them up now that I have an idea.
somethingsome|2 months ago
I remember playing with call with cc, or creating a flow programming language, thinking in higher order, etc..
I clearly do not want to work with lisp, and many of those concepts can be used in other languages without too much effort now (lambdas, map, filter, reduce,... Among the most common and useful).
I think learning lisp is nice as it helps explore interesting areas of programming on a mental level. I can't stress enough how it can wrap your mind sometimes.
Will it help you program faster and bug free? Probably not, will it improve your mental model of programming languages, probably. Will you enjoy learning abstract things, if you like solving math puzzles, probably, otherwise probably not.
It's hard to express the 'powers' it gives you, it's like spending much time thinking about simple things that usually you just use without thinking about.
As a crude example, the scope of a variable shared between two lambda function that is not shared with the global space.
Sorry that I don't have a specific example in mind, I feel like the 'power' is just spending enough time thinking on complex things.
1313ed01|2 months ago
joeevans1000|2 months ago
https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/04/22/how-gd-netcetera-u...
nateburke|2 months ago
https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/06/17/make-worse-softwar...
hulitu|2 months ago
Just like today's UX designers who need a 3D surface to draw a lousy rectangle.
philipwhiuk|2 months ago
Nobody thinks natively in nested prefix notation.
tmtvl|2 months ago
I do, but I have ASS, so I basically am a space alien of the type to appreciate alien technology.
tliltocatl|2 months ago
hkon|2 months ago
djaowjxj|2 months ago
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unknown|2 months ago
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