I have realised recently that there are much more concrete barriers to creative expression in coding: many of us are carrying around iPhones that you cannot write applications for, even for yourself, without paying a $100 a year fee. All the ways the language makes you feel means little compared to whether or not you can actually write code for your computer. The person who makes the computer can decide if you are allowed to be creative with it. And, as a society, we have decided (or perhaps been implicitly brainwashed?) to not want to be creative with our computers. In such a situation, the distinction between Java's OOP and Lisp's "computational ideas and expression" means very little.
A bit of a "Stallman was right" moment for me.
Also looping back to the article, it speaks about how lisp and smalltalk have fallen out of fashion which can explained by the more ultimate loss of permission and desire for creativity
[0] - I really typed C+ and not C++ on purpose.
Now I do not mean to be rude, but I want to really drive a point home: what you are saying sounds to me like "Advances in medicine are not so relevant, because medicine is too expensive, and people in Africa cannot pay for it anyway".
You are mixing 2 totally independent things. That Apple exist, with all the bad things (and also the good) has nothing to do with how a programming language is designed. And all things being equal, people can feel more freedom to express their programs in one or other language, independent of what platforms are avaialble to later deploy them.
Note that while today Apple exists, there is Linux, which you can really do anything you want with, with total freedom (except of some little places with blobs if you are purist) but again, nothing to do with programming languages.
If the king banned painting and someone wrote an article comparing the creative differences between oil and watercolour, I would also then point out that the difference is minute compared to the king banning painting
And that there is a country where painting is allowed does not mean it is not a major restriction for so many of us, or indeed we should not be so individualistic to say “just move”. I care how it affects others, not just me
A good example is the web. When it was given to us by Tim-Barnes Lee, the web was a free ecosystem with a simple markup language. But companies like Google decided that this was not a good thing, and now to develop a simple web site you need to know dozens of technologies, otherwise your web page will be considered outdated and disregarded by web search engines.
The same process happened to programming languages, only the ones that could be molded to the needs of large companies were deemed to be "good".
I also don’t like the hurdles of writing private Apple ecosystem apps. Apple may fix this via Playgrounds, not sure though.
I feel captured by Apple’s ecosystem, and that is not a comfortable feeling. Also, Richard is right, we just don’t listen.
Take the issue of freedom of speech. While it may be legally protected to various degrees, with the US having one of the strongest protections, is it practical when all communication happens on private platforms with opaque filtering ("moderation")?
I see the same thing in programming freedom. Android might technically be "open source" but it is no more practical to actually hack the software on your Android phone than an Apple phone. Similarly, PCs might be available that are under the complete control of the owners, but you need to be an expert programmer to realise this control.
Lisp is simply a more practical language to begin hacking. Emacs is probably the best example. Everything is there to make it easier to hack. It's not just technically free, it's practically free too.
How it became XEmacs, what the Cadillac protocols remind you of on a famous editor currently, the infrastructure for a image like development environment for C++, all around early 1990's.
You can do introspection and access the variables at runtime (using a horrible syntax), but that's it.
I don't see much artistic aspirations in the language or in its creators. Ruby already has a much better metaprogramming story and the code looks more elegant.
> Python looks like an ordinary dumb language, but semantically it has a lot in common with Lisp, and has been getting closer to Lisp over time.
> They might even let you use Ruby, which is even more Lisp-like.
It's a bit sad to see that the book he's referring to at the end is a book released in 2003, to which this is the foreword.
Lisp is an incredible experience to write and experiment in, unlike any other language I've ever worked in.
Still, I believe there are many people out in the field that are mostly about "just delivering the spec" or about making money; pragmatists who care not too much about the art behind the software, and I suspect that will always remain the case.
Craftmanship marrying art and mastery is a niche, but that doesn't mean it's not thriving in spaces for enthusiasts.
Seconded by an enthusiast posting on a site written in Arc then rewritten in SBCL ; )
Lisp cannot be completely redefined. You can’t avoid parentheses, and if you stray too far from common idiom, you’re no longer writing Lisp, you’re writing something else using Lisp syntactic forms.
I disagree here. To take rhyming as an example. It's possible to have a poem where every line rhymes AND a poem where there is no rhyme at all. It's not as simple as saying 'okay the lines in this text don't rhyme so it can't be a poem'. The same is true of the things like spacing and meter. These are all massively variable, and the result doesn't even have to be bound by the usual rules of grammar. English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.
For me the defining feature of poetry is that the form and nature of the language used in a text may suggest meaning over and above what the individual words say. This definition is subjective, and suggests that the poetry is in the eye of the beholder, but is more honest than a simplistic checklist of features to look out for.
I think one can argue that LISP is the "best" computer programming language based on a set of metrics that revolve around simplicity and composability. There's no simpler language. There simply cannot be, because there's nothing "extra" in LISP. It's the most compact (while still being human readable) way to define and/or call functions.
You can also argue that LISP is closer to English than any other programming language, because in English we use parenthesis's and lists to enumerate things related to what has been said. For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name. But "add" is a name one can read. Also "add one and two" is a valid English sentence, so all LISP programs are similarly valid English language expressions, where the parenthesis is merely used for grouping language "clauses".
If the world were ever to be forced to agree on one single high level programming language, it would necessarily need to be LISP for about 10 other huge reasons I could name: Everything from ease of writing parsers, to compression of code, simplicity, ease for learning, even as a young child, etc.
Given that most people alive today don't understand English at all, I don't think this claim holds up very well.
> For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name.
I'd be willing to wager that "1+2" is understood by far more people across the globe than "(add, 1, 2)".
I think the author examining the fads of agile or XP would draw quite opposite conclusions if they observed programming as a social activity, building a shared knowledge and understanding that is constantly refined before it is "abandoned" as a piece of software.
These days I mostly write Go for work, and as I’ve gotten older, I no longer find the act of programming profound. I take more joy in hiking and kayaking than programming, since LLMs have commoditized something that used to be gatekept to the teeth.
I’m glad that AI tools have trivialized many parts of the act and let people focus on the result rather than the process. Kind of like how good linters completely killed off the bike shedding around code aesthetics.
That said, nowadays I appreciate tools that last. Languages that take backward compatibility seriously and don’t break user code on a whim. Languages that don’t support ten ways of doing the same thing. Languages that don’t require any external dependency managers or build tools. Languages that are fast, have less syntactic noise, and let me do my stuff without much fuss. So to my eyes, those useful languages are the most beautiful.
So Python, with its bolted-on type system, no built-in dependency manager (uv doesn’t count; there will be more unless they put it in the standard toolchain), and a terrible type checker, doesn’t really appeal to me anymore.
I’m sure anyone could write a beautiful ode to any language of their choice and make something profound out of it. If I could, I’d probably write an ode to Go.
I can't see how, in 100 years (or maybe even just 50) humans will still need more than ONE computer programming language. Or at the most two. We might always need C++ to exist for low level stuff, but we only need ONE higher level language.
noelwelsh•8h ago
Douger•8h ago
noelwelsh•7h ago
EdwardCoffin•5h ago
fuzztester•4h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
kragen•1h ago