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Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

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Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#3
Having started in python land, and having started to wander into the borders of lisp land, this talk covers the experience of the transition very well. More importantly it provides great suggestions for the social aspects of getting new users over the hump (with happy intern comments as well, (I would like to hear the unhappy ones as well)).

Overall a good talk about the realities of one way to use lisp successfully in a 'modern' software development environment.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#6
post #4

too bad the audio quality is low..

indeed. there is nothing even coming out of the right channel. I had to verify with another audio source that something wasnt broken. To top it off, comments are disabled on the video so there is no way to give this feedback.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#7
Every time, I see one of these links or videos, I feel the urge to learn Lisp. But after some time, I lose the motivation. I think that is because I don't know what benefit learning lisp will provide me concretely. Anyone has any suggestion?

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#8
post #7

Every time, I see one of these links or videos, I feel the urge to learn Lisp. But after some time, I lose the motivation. I think that is because I don't know what benefit learning lisp will provide me concretely. Anyone has any suggestion?

Lisp teaches you that there's always a better tool for the job than something that's already in your toolkit. More than any other language I've worked with, Lisp makes it incredibly easy and low-friction to write domain-specific languages to solve the exact problem you're working with.

That's not always a good thing -- it can make working with a foreign codebase difficult -- but it's definitely a powerful concept when applied correctly.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#9
post #7

Every time, I see one of these links or videos, I feel the urge to learn Lisp. But after some time, I lose the motivation. I think that is because I don't know what benefit learning lisp will provide me concretely. Anyone has any suggestion?

Learning a functional language has been eye-opening, but I've always struggled with Lisp. It was Erlang that finally clicked with me.

I would suggest, if you haven't already learned one, to find some FP language that looks interesting. Elm, perhaps, or Elixir. I'm not a fan of "hybrid" languages like Scala; finding one that hews closely to the FP ideas will be more useful, I think, in learning how to think functionally.

Any new language that doesn't operate exactly like the ones you already know can give you new ideas on how to program. Don't get bogged down in the expectations others have; just find one that piques your interest and dive in.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#10
This was a much more enjoyable video than I was expecting. The audio quality really had me tempted to skip, so I encourage others to not let that turn them away.

The quote which I will paraphrase that "lisp is not freed from having to justify why you would use it." This is huge and the section before it going off about how condescension is a terrible enemy of the language is one that I would hope more people contemplate.

Major kudos to the presenter!

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