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Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

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372 points Eric_WVGG | 4 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.26s | source
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taeric ◴[16 Oct 24 15:38 UTC] No.41860340[source]▶
I do think LISP remains the major language that can encompass the strange loop idea he explored in his work. I know LISP is not the only homoiconic language, but it is the biggest that people know how to use where the "eval" function doesn't take in a string that has to be parsed.

I hate that people are convinced LISP == functional programming, writ large. Not that I dislike functional programming, but the symbolic nature of it is far more interesting to me. And it amuses me to no end that I can easily make a section of code that is driven by (go tag) sections, such that I can get GOTO programming in it very easily.

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1. throwaway19972 ◴[16 Oct 24 16:17 UTC] No.41860888[source]▶
Not to mention specifically with Scheme and continuation-oriented programming, the line between functional and non-functional programming becomes so blurry as to become nearly meaningless.
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2. brucehoult ◴[17 Oct 24 02:24 UTC] No.41865848[source]▶
Lambda: the ultimate GOTO
3. fuzztester ◴[17 Oct 24 06:45 UTC] No.41867036[source]▶
The definition of functional programming is itself quite blurry, says Chris Lattner (of Swift, LLVM, Mojo), in this talk I posted here recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41822811

4. medo-bear ◴[17 Oct 24 07:51 UTC] No.41867362[source]▶
Even the definition of a lisp is blurry when we zoom in to find the seperation boundry