a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
mk  ·  1488 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Intuition for Lisp Syntax

Yes, but I didn't start with a blank slate. Hubski started as a fork of Hacker News, which is written in Paul Graham's Arc, which is a Lisp.

I doubt we share much code anymore with HN. Also, a bit of Hubski is now in Racket, which is also a Lisp, on which Arc is dependent.

Actually, the only other languages that I have real familiarity with are Javascript and Fortran. I'm going to start learning Swift next month.

Lisp feels intuitive and natural to me. I don't comment my code, and even with all the parantheses and time away, it remains very readable to me. The idea that code can be data feels right. I suspect that the difference between people that like Lisp and people that don't has something to do with how they think. In physics, I found that people seem to have a natural aptitude for either differential equations or linear algebra, but more rarely both. I suspect that something similar is the case with Lisp.