Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

I just love his writing so much -- he captures what I felt when I discovered Lisp. As a kid learning programming in the 80s, I had already done some BASIC, Fortran, Pascal and COBOL in high school and early college. There were differences, of course, but they had some fundamental commonality.

At UC Berkeley, however, the first computer science class was taught in Scheme (a dialect of Lisp)...and it absolutely blew me away. Hofstadter is right: it feels the closest to math (reminding me a ton of my math theory classes). It was the first beautiful language I discovered.

(edit: I forgot to paste in the quote I loved!)

"...Lisp and Algol, are built around a kernel that seems as natural as a branch of mathematics. The kernel of Lisp has a crystalline purity that not only appeals to the esthetic sense, but also makes Lisp a far more flexible language than most others."

Have you tried Haskell? It feels much closer to math to me. Definitions, not procedures. It even looks like math.

No! After about 10 years of writing software professionally, I moved over to product management, and my time spent coding decreased drastically (in the last 15 years, only some Python to show my kids a thing or two).

But I'd love to try! Maybe I'll take an online class for fun.