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Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

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372 points Eric_WVGG | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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bsder ◴[] No.41864348[source]
This article simply reinforces that the primary problem with the popularity of Lisp was people explaining Lisp.

This article, like every other Lisp article, tells pre-teen me nothing that he could use. Nobody ever demonstrated how much easier task X is in Lisp over asm/C/Pascal/etc.

By contrast, current me could have told pre-teen me "Hey, that spell checker that took you 7 months to write in assembly? Yeah, it's damn near trivial in Lisp on a microcomputer with bank switched memory that nobody every knew how to utilize (it makes garbage collection completely deterministic even on a woefully underpowered CPU). Watch."

I want to weep over the time I wasted doing programming with the equivalent of tweezers, rice grains and glue because every Lisp article and textbook repeated the same worn out lists, recursion and AI crap without ever demonstrating how to do anything useful.

replies(3): >>41864831 #>>41864986 #>>41864993 #
1. abecedarius ◴[] No.41864993[source]
Hofstadter's followup article had a more interesting example.

When I first got a Byte magazine as a pre-teen, one of the articles was Lisp code for symbolic differentiation and algebraic simplification. I really couldn't follow it but felt there was something intriguing there. Certainly it wouldn't have been easier in Basic.

(Byte September 1981, AI theme issue. Later I was able to tell the code was not so hot...)

I didn't really get into Lisp until the late 80s with XLisp on a PC, and SICP. Worth the wait!