alt Hacker NewsThere's nothing "special" about Lisp and Lisp dialects, yes. Similar features can be or already have been implemented in other languages. Yet, after touching, using and experiencing working with a bunch of different stacks, I cannot simply ignore the enormous pragmatic level of Lisps.
Working with Clojure is an absolute delight. It strips down all the dogma and let's you deal with the "business logic" as if you're cooking steak using no BS ingredients - meat is meat, herbs are real, stove is hot.
Why would I ever choose bash for writing anything slightly more complex than simple redirection, when I can do things in way better fashion with babashka. Why would I wrestle a YAML CI pipeline that only fails on push, when I can drive the whole thing from a babashka task file, run each step locally in the REPL, and actually debug it?
Why would I ever deal with Lua, if I can't even format it for "readability" - no matter how I do it, it just looks darn ugly, and luafmt often makes it worse. Why, if I can just slash down dozen lines of Lua boilerplate compressing it into a three-liner Fennel macro? With Fennel, I can interactively poke through elements of my WM through Hammerspoon on Mac, and that's just bananas.
Why would I ever deal with JSON, when EDN is almost twice as compact and far more readable - I can align things and treat data as a literal table. Besides, I can group, sort, filter, slice, dice, salt & pepper that data easily, without ever leaving my trusted editor.
Why would I choose to build a web-scraper in Python, when I can use nbb driving Playwright and go through selectors interactively, directly from my editor, as if it is a devtools console. And I don't even have to restart anything, deal with state changes, etc.
How can I abandon Emacs where I can just open a scratch buffer, type some Elisp and change the behavior of my editor, my WM, my OS and even things on remote computers. No other text editing environment works the way Emacs does - nothing even comes close. It feels like playing a video game, where my controller in my editor.
Why would I write Flutter UIs in Dart, fighting the widget-tree ceremony and endless build() boilerplate, when ClojureDart lets me express the same tree as plain data and hot-reload it interactively? The layout is just nested maps and vectors.
Why would I reach for C when I need to embed a small, fast scripting layer. Text parsing alone would be a regex nightmare elsewhere.
Why would I bolt a templating engine onto HTML strings, when Hiccup makes markup just vectors - so my views compose, filter, and generate like any other data, no special templating DSL to learn
And with all sorts of different runtimes and dissimilar Lisp dialects, it still feels as if you're working with the same language. The mental overhead when switching is so negligible. While switching between just JS and TS - which are supposed to be of the "same family" - feels quite annoying. Despite the fact that I've put years into those - far longer than any Lisp I've ever used.
Sure, nothing special about Lisp at all. Except that practicing Lisp can actually make you a polyglot. You'd realize that it isn't syntax that makes a programming language, but runtime and semantics do. After years of dealing with different PLs, I lost a preference for one specific language - I'd choose the runtime best suitable for the task, and then see if I can bolt Lisp on top of it. And these days, it feels like there isn't a platform left where you can't meaningfully do things via Lisp.
I've got really mixed feelings about Clojure. Like when I read Graham's book I went through a phase of "he wouldn't be fighting with nconc if he was using Clojure!" I find some algorithms to be easy and fun to write using persistent data structures and others maddening though if I did it more I'd get better at it. zippers are weirdly unergonomic because of some little bad choices. I badly wanted to do a project with the Clara rules engine but never got the chance.
As for GNU emacs I got over it. Like I was introduced to it in 1989, it was the cool new editor for the Unix world, one of my friends loved scripting with it. However I experienced it getting really janky about 20 years before other software got janky and I don't know why. Some of it might have been rot in things it depends on, like it used to be curses apps actually worked right but now they suffer data corruption from the telnet/ssh connection and always seem to have an off-by-one on the screen size. X Windows got glitchier. I guess emacs was ahead of its time, now people write janky apps with Electron -- like I have to type R E A L L Y : S L O W L Y when I use Slack at work. Photoshop is like that too, computers are 100x's of times faster so Photoshop should boot up faster than Momo Chiyoda can transform but no, it doesn't.
I switched to vim around 2003 as my emergency Unix editor because I could log into a busted system and start working and not have to rely on the package system (often the thing that was busted) to install emacs or build it from scratch. Helps that it doesn't use continuation characters so cut and past just works, there are lots of little things that make vim live more comfortably side by side with modern GUI life than emacs does.