[info] [FoRK] The Truth about Lisp

Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> on Mon Apr 16 20:41:59 UTC 2007 
----- Forwarded message from Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> -----

From: Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:55:43 -0500
To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>
Subject: [FoRK] The Truth about Lisp
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)
Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>


This is funny.  Really.  Keep reading --- the best bits are near the  
end.

	http://secretgeek.net/lisp_truth.asp?dupe=with_honor

--

The Truth About Lisp



In which the truth about lisp is revealed, and some alternatives are  
enumerated.

Learning lisp will alter your life.

Your brain will grow bigger than you ever thought possible.

You will rewrite all of your applications in just a handful of lines

Society will shun you. You will shun society.

You will become disatisfied with everything and everyone around you.

Lisp is so simple to learn that you can learn lisp in just a few  
minutes. I just learnt it now while I was waiting for a bus.

Lisp is so simple that you can implement it in any language in just a  
few pages of code. This might never happen though, because once  
you've learnt lisp you'd never want to write anything in any language  
other than lisp, so you wouldn't bother implementing lisp in any  
language other than lisp.

Lisp can be fully implemented in lisp in just a handful of lines. I  
just implemented lisp in lisp, fully, while i was hopping onto a bus  
and paying for my bus ticket all at the same time.

When you become a lisper, you will laugh at jokes that no one else  
thinks are funny. You will know things that cannot be expressed in  
ordinary imperative language.

You will think people are idiots when they state things like "Hi, how  
are you?" because a lisper simply doesn't need to use such verbose  
constructs. Lisp abstracts away those patterns of interaction and  
makes them completely irrelevant. The proper way to greet a fellow  
lisper is just a tiny nod of the chin, and about a tenth of a wink  
from your left eye, then point at your tin foil hat. They will know  
what you mean. if they don't know what you mean then they are not a  
true lisp programmer and they don't matter anyway.

Lisp was invented a long time ago, before java, before C, before  
fortran, before computers, before people, before the earth was built.  
the universe itself is a lisp program so trivial that no true lisper  
would even both implementing it.

Lisp is so elegant that the very fact that you know even the first  
thing about it will qualify you for a season as principal dancer of  
the royal ballet. You will go out on stage in your little tutu and  
just scribble a few round brackets in the air with your toe. People  
will gasp in wonder. Unless they don't know any lisp. If they don't  
know any lisp then they are idiots and they don't matter.

Only lispers have a true definition of fun. Maybe ML programmers too.  
All of today's languages are based on fortran and lisp. The bad bits  
fortran, the good: lisp.

If you're good enough to use lisp, you'll soon be frustrated with  
lisp. Lisp is not an adequate lisp. By the time my bus had made it  
two blocks I'd written some simple lisp macros that were so powerful  
they made lisp completely obsolete and replaced it with a new  
language. Fortunately, that new language was also called lisp. And i  
was able to prove, mathematically, that the new lisp i'd created was  
both far superior to lisp in every conceivable way, but also exactly  
equivalent to lisp in every possible way. I was very excited by this.  
But also found it very boring.

Reddit is proof that lisp is really powerful. Paul Graham originally  
wrote reddit, in lisp, on the back of a napkin while he was waiting  
for a coffee. it was so powerful that it had to be rewritten in  
python just so that ordinary computers could understand it. Because  
it was written in lisp it was almost no effort to rewrite the entire  
thing, and the rewrite was completed in-between two processor cycles.  
Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp, by an earlier  
version of himself, also written in lisp, by an earlier version of  
lisp. It's lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down.

Because we've reached the limits of moore's law, the computers of the  
future will have many-core processors and all our programs will need  
to be written in a combination of haskell and lisp, that will itself  
be so powerful that the computers of the future will not be able to  
implement any of our ideas without creating time-travelling  
algorithms that borrow processing power from other computers that are  
further into the future. This sounds difficult, but in lisp it isn't  
difficult at all. in haskell this is a built-in feature and the way  
you implement it is just a no-brainer to any one who knows lisp or  
haskell.

After that, the computer of the future will be called The Lisputer.  
It's speed will be measured using the Lispunit, which is a measure of  
how many simultaneous arguments about the inadequacy of lisp can be  
proposed and defeated by an infinite number of lisp pundits without  
any actual decisions being made. Today's computers run at just under  
one lispunit. The Lisputer will run at lisp Lispunits, where lisp is  
a fundamental maximum constant of the universe that can't be  
expressed using ordinary imperative numerals. Suffice to say that it  
ends with an infinite number of closing parentheses.



Anyway. i read an article about lisp on the bus today. Top article.  
All the articles on lisp are really full on -- my brain starts to  
explode out my ear. This one, lisp is sin, was by Sriram Krishnan, in  
which he talked about doing C# for work, but Lisp for fun. And he  
touched on some of the ways in which C# is moving toward lisp.

Here's some of the technologies that the commentors at that article  
suggested as possible substitutes for a lisp addict:

newLisp
ML
Perl6
nermerle
smalltalk
biobike
chez scheme
Common Larceny
XSLT
OCaml
LSharp
Lua
C Omega
F#
C# with Linq
Also, one person suggested porting the python libraries to lisp.

Curious for its absense: Ruby (see article Why Ruby is an acceptable  
lisp, and steve yegge's response: 'lisp is not an acceptable lisp')

(p.s. first person to write a comment that says "Paul Graham did not  
write reddit" deserves a lollipop.)


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