Ask HN: Why Should I Learn Lisp?

8 points by testing_1_2_3_4 4 years ago | 9 comments

jstx1 4 years ago |

The most obvious benefit seems to be that it allows you to look down on people who don't know it. Make sure to mask this with a lot of talk about how it allows you to think differently and by dropping big words such as homoiconicity - that way some people will mistake your arrogance and pretentiousness for genuine superiority.

If you want to build an online following based on this, I warn you that the market has already been cornered.

foobarbaz33 4 years ago |

Two things mostly unique to lisp.

    1. Live editing, where your code evals and applies to the running image as you write it in your editor. 

    2. Easy full-proof macros.  Not to be confused with the text-wrangling style of macros you would find in C.

Most languages cannot provide these things. And they're really really nice things to have.

Why aren't features #1 and #2 more popular in other languages? People don't miss what they never experienced. And both of those features require design at the runtime level and syntax level of the language to be implemented in a way that doesn't suck. They can't just be bolted on to a any random language like C++. Even though C++ likes to bolt on every feature it can.

Why would you learn lisp? To get features #1 and #2 in hopes of increasing your productivity.

Qem 4 years ago | |

Smalltalk is strong in this front too, at least regarding (1). Perhaps not (2), but its flavor of metaprogramming stands by itself. See https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/lisp-smalltalk-and-the-pow...

_dave 4 years ago |

The obvious answer is because it's cool.

Seriously though, tinkering with Common Lisp did prepare me a bit for my first Rails job since Ruby is, as I describe it, like "Perl and Smalltalk had a baby with Lisp sitting in the closet dressed like Superman, watching". Pragmatically, you might not need to touch Lisp, but going through it may show you some common pitfalls that occur in other languages and makes you wish there were Lispy features outside of it.

CLPadvocate 4 years ago |

Lisp shows you a completely different way of thinking about soving problems and even if you never use Lisp itself (or any of its flavours) afterwards, you still can use the methods and concepts you'll learn to create much better software.

diatone 4 years ago |

Ever wanted to serialize a closure?

https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

a3n 4 years ago |

So you can create a Domain Specific Language to answer that question.

k0t0n0 4 years ago |

Data oriented programming.

tra3 4 years ago |

So you can hack on emacs.

1. Live editing, where your code evals and applies to the running image as you write it in your editor. 2. Easy full-proof macros. Not to be confused with the text-wrangling style of macros you would find in C.