WhitneyLand

Does Lisp Suck?

If HN had a FAQ this might be near the top. As new people go into CS they seem to be aesthetically drawn to, or repulsed by, Lisp. The irony is there is no objective truth so these two groups of people spend a lot of time supporting their arguments (google search will amaze you, even Paul Graham has been sucked into this) but it's not very common for people to change sides after their initial indoctrination.

I have come to view this as one of few (only?) metaphysical topics seriously discussed in computer science.

Someone on SO once said: 'the correct Lisp answer is more gnomic. Something like: "If you have to ask, you are not ready." Then if anyone questions further, the correct answer is either "yes" if it's an either/or question or "You are not ready."'

pebblexe
The only thing you need to do to understand lisp's entrancement is to write an interpreter for it, and in doing so you'll see why it's easier to write a lisp interpreter than it is for any other language. All you need to understand the appeal is a look at https://github.com/kanaka/mal.

Personally I learned the appeal of lisp while following this tutorial on writing a scheme in Haskell: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_.... There's a reason there'll never be a tutorial like that for a toy Haskell interpreter.