I'm into Lisp because Lisp languages are easy to work in. I advocate the family as being good for nonprogrammers.
Small children should learn some kind of Lisp, and easily can.
Richard Stallman famously shared an anecdote in the article "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html) about the secretaries:
> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
People, whether inside or outside of Lisp, who spread myths that that it is some scary, esoteric elite family of languages, have been pretty harmful.
alt Hacker News
I'm into Lisp because Lisp languages are easy to work in. I advocate the family as being good for nonprogrammers.
Small children should learn some kind of Lisp, and easily can.
Richard Stallman famously shared an anecdote in the article "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html) about the secretaries:
> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
People, whether inside or outside of Lisp, who spread myths that that it is some scary, esoteric elite family of languages, have been pretty harmful.