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

I agree. Especially as someone that likes LISP-like languages and uses Janet and Fennel quite a bit (and some elisp, in the past also Clojure) but never used a macro for anything. Would love to hear more about that third dimension I am missing out on.

Ditto.

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.

This is too high level, but I found this:

https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2025/04/22/how-gd-netcetera-u...

Hmmm... this might be a way:

"You can get in touch with us at consult@redplanetlabs.com to schedule a free consultation to talk about your application and/or pair program on it. Rama is free for production clusters for up to two nodes and can be downloaded at this page."

Marcos are only very appealing to tyros. Most old salt Lispers avoid them. I would argue that a macro is only appropriate if you are adding a genuine syntactic feature to a language (one hint that this is the case is if your macro involves binding variables).

Let say.. I remember quite well when I learned Lisp, and differently to any other language I learned, it gave me profound insights and even more profound frustration trying to understand some concepts.

I remember playing with call with cc, or creating a flow programming language, thinking in higher order, etc..

I clearly do not want to work with lisp, and many of those concepts can be used in other languages without too much effort now (lambdas, map, filter, reduce,... Among the most common and useful).

I think learning lisp is nice as it helps explore interesting areas of programming on a mental level. I can't stress enough how it can wrap your mind sometimes.

Will it help you program faster and bug free? Probably not, will it improve your mental model of programming languages, probably. Will you enjoy learning abstract things, if you like solving math puzzles, probably, otherwise probably not.

It's hard to express the 'powers' it gives you, it's like spending much time thinking about simple things that usually you just use without thinking about.

As a crude example, the scope of a variable shared between two lambda function that is not shared with the global space.

Sorry that I don't have a specific example in mind, I feel like the 'power' is just spending enough time thinking on complex things.