The programmers who live in Flatland • Hacker News Board

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#21

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really about Clojure or lisp.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#22

Post by johnfn » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #14

johnfn wrote: post #13

> Many point to “ecosystems” as the barrier, an argument that’s valid for Common Lisp but not for Clojure, which interops easily with one of the largest ecosystems in existence. So many misperceptions dominate, especially the reflexive reaction that the parentheses are “weird”. Most importantly, you almost never see these perceived costs weighed against Clojure’s huge benefits. Macros are the focus of this post, but…

In reality, most people, intelligent though they may be, don’t consider and reject Lisp, so that argument doesn’t really work. I know it irritates people who actually do consider and reject Lisp, but those people don’t realize that they’re a tiny elite who are not the target of these essays. There are plenty of reasons it might be better not to use Lisp, but very few people actually get as far as considering them.

Quite a lot of people have given Lisp a shot and determined, for one reason or another, that it doesn't work for them. Why wouldn't that be the case? There are no special forces that prevent people from giving Lisp a shot when every other popular language in the world was at one point in time was at Lisp's level of popularity, and overcome the barriers that Lisp could not.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#23

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness.

This is a profound misapprehension of the nature of language design. Languages exist within contexts, and embody tradeoffs. It is possible- common, even- to fully grasp the capabilities of a language like lisp and still find it inappropriate or undesirable for a given task. Pick any given context- safety-critical medical applications, constrained programming for microcontrollers or GPUs, livecoding environments where saving keystrokes is king- and you can find specialized languages with novel tools, execution models, and affordances. Perhaps it never crossed Paul Graham's mind that lisp itself might be a "blub" to others, in other situations.

The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#24

Post by ruricolist » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

chromaton wrote: post #15

Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.

The sketch here would be that Lisps used to be exceptionally resource-intensive, allowing closer-to-metal languages to proliferate and become the default. But nowadays even Common Lisp is a simple and lightweight language next to say Python or C++. Still it's hard to overcome the inertia of the past's massive investments in education in less abstraction-friendly languages.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#25

Post by libraryofbabel » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #21

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced. The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really abo…

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#26

Post by wrs » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #22

wrs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, most people, intelligent though they may be, don’t consider and reject Lisp, so that argument doesn’t really work. I know it irritates people who actually do consider and reject Lisp, but those people don’t realize that they’re a tiny elite who are not the target of these essays. There are plenty of reasons it might be better not to use Lisp, but very few people actually get as far as considering them.

Quite a lot of people have given Lisp a shot and determined, for one reason or another, that it doesn't work for them. Why wouldn't that be the case? There are no special forces that prevent people from giving Lisp a shot when every other popular language in the world was at one point in time was at Lisp's level of popularity, and overcome the barriers that Lisp could not.

The essay’s thesis is “most people don’t consider Lisp because they don’t know what’s different and special about it”. I think that’s unarguably the case. You equated that with “everyone else is stupid”, which is uncharitable and not at all what the essay says. Why would you even bother to write an essay if your audience is too stupid to understand what you’re saying?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#27

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #17

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers. The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem. "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving…

> "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations ... Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale.

I think the field of programming languages has grown enough that we have to start acknowledging the future of programming largely won't be in the context of what it means for devs working at large corporations. One of my favorite talks is from Amy J. Ko called A Human View of Programming [1], which argues there are many other ways to look at programming than "tool for generating business activity" and "mathematical construct", which heretofore have been the dominant views of programming languages.

Because there are so many other forms and purposes programming languages can and will take (she goes through them in the talk), so evaluating them and creating them solely on how well they are able to fit into a corporate R&D pipeline is a very narrow and short-term view of the field.

Indeed, it's been the case for a long time now that most people who write programs are not in fact professional software developers. The most used language in the world is Excel, by several orders of magnitude, and it's the opposite of everything devs say a "proper" language must be. There's something we as a field still need to learn from that.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjkzAls5fsI

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#28

Post by tra3 » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

I've been using emacs and have written a a few thousand lines of elisp. I like elisp. I generally like any language that I become proficient in. But lisp isn't some sort of magical hammer that turns everyone into 10x programmers.

Maybe I still haven't had my epiphany, but I'm not a huge fan of macros in lisps and DSLs (like what ruby is known for). It makes code harder to understand.

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#29

Post by AlotOfReading » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #27

AlotOfReading wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers. The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem. "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving…

> "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations ... Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. I think the field of programming languages has grown enough that we have to start acknowledging the future of programming largely won't be in t…

As a member of the handmade community, I certainly hope that corporate constraints aren't the main future of the field. I just think it's a major part of the answer as it stands today.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#30

Post by GMoromisato » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

Robust macros allow you to create domain-specific abstractions. That's cool, but there are plenty of other ways. Even functions are a way to create abstractions. And with anonymous functions, you can easily create higher-order abstractions.

The only thing AST-level macros help with is creating custom syntax to cut down on boilerplate. That's very cool, but it comes with a cost: now you have to learn new syntax.

I love Lisp. I've written tiny Lisp interpreters for most of my games (Chron X, Transcendence) and even GridWhale started out with a Lisp-like language.

In my experience, Lisp is great when you have a single programmer who understands and controls the whole source tree. Once a program exceeds the capacity of a single programmer, more conventional languages work better.