Why LISP Is The Language of Legends 

Wouldn't be a LISP video without a microphone that sounds straight out of 2004

Been an AutoCAD operator in Civil Engineering since 1987. My only experience with coding until then was a FORTRAN class in junior college where we had to turn in our assignments on a Hollerith card deck, which would be run overnight on a computer that took up an entire building. I hated those stupid punch card machines. Then, the engineering company I worked for bought 5 AutoCAD seats and shiny new 286s to run them. I got picked to be in the first wave and it was amazing. Being a natural tinkerer, I soon dug deep enough in the docs to discover AUTOLISP. I fell in love. The structure of LISP as a tool to make AutoCAD do whatever I wanted gave such a feeling of power. I spent most of my personal time creating LISP routines to automate the drudgery of drawing plans, and I soon became the office Guru. For anyone who has limited experience coding, LISP is something you should take a look at before any other language.

I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to build a couple of backend server applications in Clojure. It's always been a joy. The architecture is always just a tree of expression calls, which makes holding the model of the architecture in my head trivially easy, and because Lisps prefer short functions, my programs end up as a DSL composing the prose of my program, with virtually no boilerplate. Lisp takes the "code reuse" OOP fanatics rave about and pushes it to 9000 without even trying, and you don't even need objects to do it.

I remember learning lisp around 2005 after reading some Paul Graham essays and it bent my mind it all the best ways. This video was great.

I haven't heard anyone break it down so succinctly! Thank you.

I really like this video, full of great content. I think a priority moving forward for your videos would be to get a new mic, or possibly config how you use it.

I love this content, summarizes the vibe I get from this linguistic family very well. I am still a newbie to this system but whilst looking at ZealOS and the early history of the LISP family (allowing it to be very dense compact for retro machines), I can only imagine my retro computer system project thing I am still designing rn to operate with some dialect of such with the REPL and all. So ya, I research history down to the 1910s for my quest as to liberate myself and hopefully contribute something of empowering value back to the world. Stay awesome!

I can't disagree, Lol I loved the overview; excited for more :D

this video was pretty eye opening!

The python shade haha great video.

The python comment was funny. We also managed to create Rust later that actually does accomplish many features of both successfully and is impossible to write and get to compile. But when/if it does, it's beautiful and the code looks nice on top of running fast. I can see why people used lisp. And I can see why people don't use lisp. Especially I can see why people wouldn't read other lisper's programs (because when you create a new language inside a language, you essentially create a barrier where you're only technically using the language you announce using, the other person can't speak it). I really wish the comparison in 2020's was not java though. I think something else would be more representative and universal of the basic structure differences. Although can't argue that there's been a lot of java in the last 10 years or so.

great vid! not gonna lie, almost clicked away because of the echo in the beginning, but glad I stayed. I did a project in clojure at my last job. Didn't do a good job breaking up my functions, and that thing became parenthesis soup. Made me love functional programming, though!

A very nice explanation, and short.

awesome! more please!

Great video! Great explanation!

Nice video, I am writing professionaly elixir for a few years now and we have macros there too. To make things eaiser to understand for others, say that the macro expansion is the first stage of compilation and then the second is the actual compilation that generates IL or whatever the hell lisp compiler does.

loved it!

Nice, that's very smart of lisp developers

Awesome video! Thanks. LISP. Language of the Gods.

Wonderful!

Thanks man

Thanks!

Unfortunately the "just use maps bra" approach is sometimes preventing people from extending the language. They get stuck in a false trichotamy of "code" "data" and "language" which is baggage from other languages. In the end, you should end up with a language made of language that describes the problem very clearly using mostly new well documented symbols. Instead we get a fleet of JSON nibblers and a very rigid vector/map parser and the same map literals/arrow macros pasted over and over again with small tweaks.

I've converged on the "What They Teach In Harvard Business School/What They Don't Teach In Harvard Business School" approach to programming: Use Forth to talk to a real machine. Use Lisp to avoid talking to a real machine. Use both together and you have all of programming.

great video

lol at 2:00!

I love LISP!

Great video. The sound is not typical yt but it totally fits with the spirit of the presentation. Thanks

6:07 lmao

BTW: I like the addition "for better or for worse." Writing well in Lisp requires taste. It's way too easy to make a real dog's breakfast of ill-considered macros. N.B. I am by no means considering myself as exemplary here. I'd have to be firing on all cylinders if I were to contemplate writing a macro for anything but my own consumption; I'm generally too stupid to do better.

1:58 i didnt expect that,lol

5:55 you can write compiler plugins in Java tho.

Julia might fit the place where Python failed. It looks a lot like Python (although with end tags instead of syntactic whitespace, and n-dim arrays are easy to work with), but it has powerful macros, inspired directly by Lisp. Plus it has strong performance.

3:00 I use Python 3 these days, but I still find myself slipping back into Python 2 syntax on occasion. Unlearning is hard.

If videos were websites this one would be Geocities... Also good content but I spent more time playing with the volume to compensate for the different devices and settings the creator must've used for the different segments that I would've certainly absorbed way more of the knowledge treasure otherwise.

1:56 lol

Lisp will never die. It’s too fundamental. Sure, dialects will change, Maclisp to Scheme to Common Lisp to Clojure, etc., but the core ideas are all still there.

Good video, but you kinda lost me in the beginning. I thought Lambda Calculus was a model for a Turing Machine; I didn't know they were separate back then. Can someone enlighten me further?

Good Video. 🍷🗿

As much as I wanted to like lisp (specifically elisp), I found the error messages to be not great and that deterred me from spending a ton of time on it.

3:29 in short: it uses prefix notation, okay, moving on. (for those wondering: language using postfix notation is "forth")

any variants of lisp used in production in say,cutting edge technology development? in fields such as FinTech?.Could you point me to those flavors of lisp.Also,could you a video how to effectively and in short time learn lisp to solve Lisp-specific production load based problems in real world.I dont seem have bandwidth for lot of languages to learn and create fixes for their idiosyncratic "Gotchas" to get things flowing well in production!!.your comments or later indepth technical Vlog or blog would be helpful.You love lisp and you are advocate of it.One more thing to create a big project how many man-hours needed with lisp vs others and maintainability,hirability

I like the video, but the mic quality really bad

The Python bit was dirty. 😂

Sound effect: eavesdropping in a public toilets in the 50's 👌🏻

Garbage collection should collect itself (I'm a C++ enjoyer)

I want to give it a try! From Wikipedia: "Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, and Clojure." Which one should I pick?

Great channel, great content. Keep it up man! And get a new fcking mic, google worker has muney fur sure.

Great video. Except that mathematical operators in Lisp are not operators, but functions themselves...

The thing that keeps me from learning lisp is just the horrible tooling. There are 20 different tools and tutorials for everything and everyone of them is deprecated or outdated and does not work. Same goes for the libraries. Whatever the problem is, the solution to it existed 15 years ago, but is not available anymore.

LISP macros are a double edged sword. They make LISP so plastic that you can't really make any assumptions about a LISP program you didn't write yourself and can expect to be learning yet another special sub-flavour of LISP every time you start reading code from a new project. Imperative and non-LISP functional languages have come a long way since the days of PASCAL and FORTRAN and features like polymorphism, multiple dispatch, generics and algebraic datatypes have greatly increased the flexibility of infix languages without burdening the programmer with boilerplate headaches.

not enough boxing

isn't it clojure logo ?, btw please fix your mic

Oh god the jab at python was lethal

Real programmers use Forth and C. Forth is a lot like LISP though. Instead of ( + 3 4 ) you write 3 4 + (no parenthesis!). Like LISP, it is reflective, so you can redefine the entire language as well. You can even make loops or conditionals WITHOUT using macros.

the sound hurts

What's your opinion on Rust?

it feels like the compiler writer of lisp implemented the AST and then was too lazy to continue, called it a day.

I like this, but there's a whole 'nother level of LISP magic. When you learn it, you absorb the design and what for want of a better term I'll call the _philosophy_ of LISP, which makes you a better programmer in other languages. It's also practically impossible *not* to write a LISP interpreter just for the yuks.

Are you programmer or standuper ? ;)

Having my languge work the same every single time has alot of advantages. It mainly forces people to not do dumb esotric stuff i wouldnt be able to read. One of my big issues with cpython is that rarely the c code does weird shit that is simply impossible to debug because it fucked with the interpter itself. I had this line in my code once Self.b=value Assert(self.b==value) And it fucking failed... This was with trying to overitw huggingfac3 tokenizer...

why do programmers call languages that have english syntax "easy for humans to understand"? lisp could just be easier for people used to head initial syntax

my ears

Dude, you have to buy a new mic!

Java did not derive from FORTRAN

LoL

the more I listen to this the stronger my fear of Lisp grows. Thank you, but no thank you. I'd rather be happily spending my days with Python and Java

But you can't create AI using lisp. yet.

Programmer on day 1 : Lisp is so powerful, let write macros and shit Programmer on day 20 : Why is this shitty for loop doesn't work as a for loop, let use git blame to find out. Why git blame doesn't work ? I need to speak to the manager to see who change git behavior with shitty Lisp macros Manager : You are the only programmer on this shitty Lisp project, you beg me for 1 year to write in Lisp

I have been programming in Lisp for 4 years. For simple tasks, lisp is fine, but for medium/complex applications, it's terrible. This language is only suitable for certain types of applications. Trust me, if you choose Lisp, think twice, because chances are there are better alternatives for your task.

haha "accomplishes neither"

looks like someone hasn’t been eating his python soy 🐍🍲🙄

LISP is a language generator. it is not a language.

What degenerate dialect of Lisp is this? Oh, it's Clojure, the not-Lisp that only has a small fraction of Lisp's power. The JVM is a ball and chain around Clojure's leg. At least it has macros. That means it's possible to implement async and await, which Java itself does not have.

Yes In theory LISP is miles better than any other language. But in the real world it simply cannot PERFORM.

Lisp is crap. (out of experience). Even Forth is better.

(if(=x 10)(println 'hi')).......WTF ..bro, THAT IS JUST SAD......looks to me like the worst syntax in the world.

"...we managed to create a language that accomplishes neither." Ouch! My sides! /me ∉ pythonistas