Lisp

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 28 Aug 2022 06:54
Open in Logseq
    • A big influence and so far the only one that isn't a person (John McCarthy invented the first version but it's grown quite beyond his original concept). I learned Lisp by hanging out at the MIT AI lab with some of the Symbolics founders, and have been using it as my main tool ever since. The Lisp Machine remains at the pinnacle of environments for programming as a design activity; I don't know why the state of the art hasn't advanced since then.
    • Working in Lisp gives you a kind of feeling that is hard to describe; its almost as if abstractions take on a tactile quality; there is very little boundary between thought and its realization. Lisp is not the only computational system to have this quality, but it's been the one I've made a home in. Roam has some of that quality and it's not a coincidence that it is implemented in the Lisp dialect Clojure.
    • See also

      • cogniscient.com is a collection of Lisp resources by Jeff Shrager. He asked me for recs and I came up with this list:
        • Guy Steele's HOPL paper (and the ones for Smalltalk and Logo actually)
        • SICP and all of the Lambda the Ultimate papers.
        • Rich Hickey (Clojure designer) has a bunch of videos that are very well regarded