screwlisp
What's a not-that-terrible way to echo Steele's remarks in The Evolution of #Lisp that people use lisp because of our (in-arguably correct) perception that lisp is clearly the best, what Steele refers to as lisp's cachet.
I was also remembering @hayley's sometime remark that part of what keeps lisp great is the verdant mulch of people who really think lisp is the best doing their best to be the best, but they're actually mostly pretty nuts. I think it's important to be those people basically.
screwlisp
I kind of want to argue that the being pretty nuts part is fundamental and somewhat excludes being a business-as-usual-"business-logic".
screwlisp
@hayley
Eh, do you ever delete things from your phlog? I can try and find it.
Hayley
screwlisp
@hayley sorry for putting words into your mouth anyway. I was pretty sure I remembered it but didn't have a link prepared.
screwlisp
@hayley
Fwiw, your words were
"
the "lone wolves" of Lisp work as metaphorical compost: they are dead, and they smell funny, but they help produce better projects
"
https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.html
AN/CRM-114
@screwtape @hayley This thread has put “cachet invalidation” in my mind and it ain’t leaving
This line of reasoning rhymes with a visual “sociopath test” I saw many years ago which presented at least one old-woman/rabbit two-faces/vase optical illusions and purported that sociopaths are able to see both because they are not bound to a single interpretation of reality
If C and its classics are in Latin, then Lisp and its classics are in Chinese: a radically different mode of expressing ideas in spoken and written words. To a mind trained only on Virgil and Cicero, so to speak, iteration and recursion are worlds apart, but to one who has read The Water Margin and Journey to the West (really the Little Schemer) they are simply aminor differences in phrasing
Which is a long winded way of agreeing that to understand Lisp you have to be at least moderately insane (haha yes)
AN/CRM-114
@screwtape @hayley as
An aside, when “The Bipolar Lisp Programmer” speaks of C being like making a mosaic from hot glue and lentils, the image in my mind is the fresco of Justinian I in Ravenna
screwlisp
@hayley oh, I left out a really key part of that sentence.
The half-done projects produced by the "lone wolves"
I guess the lone wolves themselves aren't dead and have more of a sophisticated fish smell.
Hayley
Charles U. Farley
@flyingsaceur I would like to propose the alternate theory that learning C breaks your brain such that it becomes difficult to understand Lisp.
screwlisp
@freakazoid @flyingsaceur @hayley
I'm re-reading
http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
and realising that most of the quotes are literally things I say week to week, eg yesterday I was talking about Waters' Series in lisp (as you know).
"
Several will beat Haskell .. flame wars ..
Endgame: A random old-time Lisp hacker's collection of macros* will add up to an undocumented, unportable, bug-ridden implementation of 80% of Haskell because Lisp is more powerful than Haskell.
"
* Made 12 years before Haskell
Gnuxie 💜🐝
screwlisp
@Gnuxie
Oh, yeah, I agree with you actually. Please mentally retcon in this agreement anywhere you see me disagreeing.
AN/CRM-114
@freakazoid @screwtape @hayley Thinking about the number of junior Python programmers who “declare” variables like each one is coming out of their paychecks, I have to agree
🎵in a sky full of people, only some want to fly, isn't that crazy
screwlisp
@Gnuxie
Mmm, so my proximal thought that dragged me into this was reconciling clojure-style transducers with Waters' Series (in the curse, the comparison is lisp Series and Haskell). I wanted lisp to have the-best-thing, and it was unclear to me what that meant. Maybe wanting other people to agree with me or wanting to agree with others about what the-best-thing is is the mistake.
One product of the flame wars was that Series, generators and gatherers did become friends, eventually.
@hayley
Gnuxie 💜🐝
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