The programmers who live in Flatland

it'd be nice if there was an attempt to give an example of what kind of powers moving into 3d-lispland allows instead of just saying that it's beyond the comprehension of the 2d-planar programmers.

because, i guarantee that it's not beyond our comprehension. at some point the author was a 2d-er that read/did something and had their understanding expanded. so... do that for us

Alan Kay said something similar back in the 90s, framing it as ants living on the "pink plane" and the "blue plane". What he said at the time was an ant crawling on the pink plane can do a lot of pink plane things, but he won't think about the kinds of things he can do on the orthogonal blue plane, because he's never been there so he doesn't have those thoughts. Innovation in PLs comes when someone from the pink plane travels to the blue plane and brings back all they have seen, which causes people in the pink plane to start thinking new (bluer) thoughts.

  I'm going to use a metaphor for this talk which is drawn from a wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. One of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be.—Learning.—He realized that learning, of course, is an act of creation itself, because something happens in you that wasn't there before. He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about. Creative acts, generally, are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. He says, every once in a while, even though you have been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea. Maybe when you're taking a shower. Maybe when you're out jogging. Maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment, suddenly, that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at, appears to you in a completely different light, as though it were something else.

https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay_at_OOPSLA_1997:_...

Thought this was going to be about the new discovery of a 1d spaceship in conway's game of life. Stuff is nuts. https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf

and I thought it would be about influence of spherical geometry for maps and stuff, and how that differs from standard arr[x][y]

This, exactly.

I had heard before that Lisp had something called "macros", but I didn't know exactly what they were or how they differed from C macros. This blog post kind of explains that, but not in a way that couldn't also apply to C macros if you tried hard enough.

I want to know more, but I didn't have any examples here to look at. I may look them up now that I have an idea.