Lisp: A Cult I Almost Joined (2005)
> For the non-programmers among you, here's the executive summary of how to program: 1. Surf the Net for packages by other people that do what you need to get done. 2. Repeat step one until you've gathered everything you need. 3. Write a program that calls the modules you've collected. This is a great method, because step three is potentially very brief, provided there are enough modules out there.
This is true of some programming, but not all. If I need to do some quick data munging, or build a CRUD application, lisp may not provide any benefits over another language in which I am equally skilled. But if I am programming in a complicated domain or doing exploratory work, I would rather be using lisp than any other language.
The point the author brings up about the lack of Lisp modules in 2005 is an interesting one and reminds me of the article "Why Perl Didn't Win", posted within the last few days. Browsing clojars.org, a Clojure repository, reveals that there are 11,435 libraries at the time of my writing. That is a great improvement, vastly exceeding the author's positive example of Python's 249 modules at the time. PyPI, a Python repository, currently lists 54,060, so clearly Python is still much more popular than Clojure. Yet, the 11K Clojure libraries seems to be a direct contradiction to his statement: "And lisp modules? Well, every part of the code can modify every other part. You can write a whole new grammar if you're so inclined. None of this helps with the goal of downloading a random package and easily calling whatever you want from it with minimal hassle. There's just a fundamental conflict between easy modularity on the one hand, which requires lots of restrictions and boring standard forms, and fluid modifiability on the other." The Clojure community has made great strides in promoting the adoption of a Lisp among programmers and enterprises.
> When I was in Morocco, several different people told me that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam after seeing the Earth, and that Cat Stevens converted. At first, this was OK, but soon, after the third person or so mentioned this pair, I got to wondering, maybe they're the only ones.
In case anybody else wondered about this: Neil's Armstrong purported conversion is a hoax that has its origins in an Indonesian pop song from the 80s (Indonesia is a major muslim country). [1]
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YnwCUmQ...
> If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it's a church.
> If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it's a cult.
An interesting definition I totally disagree with. It's the social disapproval that turned any of us into geeks, and guess what - I personally like it that way. Society approves mostly things that are pointless or boring anyway. An example: why do you think HN guidelines advocate against posting mainstream news?
I tried out Lisp sometime around 2009 or so and immediately realized it was a toy language. Interesting for it's unique approach to structuring code, but ultimately designed for a certain kind of mathematical elegance over practical functionality. It grew especially popular with ai researchers, because they were searching for beautiful answers to the messy problem of intelligence, and didn't think performance was as critical as ideas. And it grew fans here and there for certain low-performance applications because it was one of the first languages with productivity enhancing features like garbage collection.
Lisp may have been "mind blowing" before untyped scripting languages were a dime a dozen, but these days the only thing mind-blowing about it is that people still use it when there are much better alternatives.
I wouldn't call it a cult. I find a lot of people who write CL / SBCL don't care much for Clojure. That was a few years ago though, so maybe this has changed?
Older discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367746