
The Nature of Lisp - iamelgringo
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html
======
jetako
Been lurking here for awhile, but this article compelled me to finally
register. It's the best introductory article I've ever read for any language.
The XML analogy instantly illuminated the basic Lisp ideology for me, and it's
a great example of how seemingly obscure language concepts can make immediate
sense when presented in a familiar way.

------
daniel-cussen
"Learning Lisp is an uphill battle. Even though in Computer Science terms Lisp
is an ancient language, few people to date figured out how to teach it well
enough to make it accessible. Despite great efforts by many Lisp advocates,
learning Lisp today is still hard."

I agree. I'm going from newb to lisper, and it hurts.

~~~
brlewis
Learning Lisp is hard up front but makes things easy later. Last week we got a
digital photo frame to see how well it worked with ourdoings.com and found
that, though it worked, 4 new RSS feeds would be a big win. I implemented them
in about 20 minutes in Scheme. Added few lines to the codebase. In other
languages I would have been tempted to cut/paste.

For more on the photo frame and RSS feeds, see

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01>

------
jcl
"Code is also always data! Does it mean that data is also always code? As
crazy as this sounds this very well might be the case."

My programming languages professor (a Scheme fanatic) expressed a similar
sentiment. I recall, however, someone posting this "programmer hierarchy"
recently:

<http://bc.tech.coop/blog/061226.html>

I find it funny that the hierarchy has "Lisp programmers" at the top and
"people who insist on calling HTML a programming language" on the bottom, yet
the people I've seen arguing for the programming language status of HTML are
predominantly Lisp programmers.

------
dnaquin
you know. the first course of the computer science degree at my undergraduate
university (rice). was a lisp course. and though i wasn't one of the many who
griped and groaned about working in something other than c/c++ or java, five
years later and i'm only starting to appreciate the perspective it's given me.

------
pchristensen
There was a good thread last week about learning Lisp:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126186> (a child comment on that thread
that summed up a lot of the ideas).

