The programmers who live in Flatland

Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp.

Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.

In the absence of that, the entire article can be refuted by quoting The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

You can also read anybody ranting about how great Zig comptime is if you want more contemporary examples.

If someone writes code based on an algorithm out of a 1985 textbook, and I tell them that they could make it go 20X faster if they learned more about processor architecture (out-of-order execution, cache coherency, NUMA, etc.) — a new dimension of programming to them — am I making an ad hominem attack?

Once I made somebody’s SQL query 100X faster by explaining what an index was. Fortunately they didn’t think I was attacking their intelligence.

Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions are a better version of JSON and are first class components of Lisp.

I think it's just trying to say there's another dimension, the meta-level enabled by macros and Lisp's syntax that opens up the possibility of new solutions, which may or may not be better, as that's so context dependent.

But what I feel it's saying is you can't even begin to imagine solutions that leverage this new dimension without learning about it and getting to grip with it mentally.

In that sense, it's saying when you don't know, you can't even explore the space of solutions at that higher dimension, not necessarily that they're better for all problems.

(but you often get something much better when config files are plain lisp code; i.e. they are eval'ed, assuming that the threat model allows it)

Next time try calling them a "2D programmer who lives in flatland" for not knowing about indexes and tell me how it goes.

It’s hard to explain without explaining a bunch of what a specific library does. But many clojure libraries expose macros that let you interact with them in much more readable/terse ways.

I’m on my phone but a good one to google is core.logic. It exposes a macro to define a “logic function”, which lets you define logical expressions using pattern matching. You can come up with rules that would be many more LOC and less readable as a normal function. You can of course define them as a normal function too, which is useful when the pattern matching doesn’t express the problem well!

1) Electric Clojure 2) Rama

The book was originally written as a metaphor for understanding a fourth spatial dimension, and as far as I know the metaphor is generally taken as helpful, not demeaning. The flatlanders are never described in an unflattering way.