The Spirit of Lisp (some young kid's impression)
Tagged as LISP, Programming
Written on 2010-11-12 20:13:28
Disclaimer: I am not speaking for the CL community. Hell, depending on who you ask there *is* no Common Lisp community. If you're an old hat lisper, this article will probably make you groan, scratch your beard, kick something and mumble something like "Lisp just smells funny, News at 11". I'm posting it because I haven't put the words down before and the thoughts bring me joy. But *this is not news*. Because news is at 11. If you're a not-yet (common) lisper who has some interest in the language, my hope is that if you show up on #lisp or otherwise begin investigating or playing with lisp, you'll arrive with a slightly more informed perspective.I recently read something on Zach Beane aka xach's blog that made me quite happy. He was posting about this year's International Lisp Conference and discussed (among other things) the low attendance this year and some possible causes of that. But then he went on to write this wonderful bit,
"I really like getting together in space and time with other Lispers. An ideal future Lisp conference for me, personally, would ... attract hundreds of cheerful and enthusiastic Lisp nerds...Navel-gazing and nostalgia would be at a minimum. People would talk about what they're doing today and what exciting things they plan for the future. Everyone would get together at dinner and swap stories about Lisp, life, and whatever else came to mind.
I know people are doing fun stuff with Lisp because I talk to them every day about it online. It would be pretty special to talk to them for a few days about it face-to-face."
...which in part led me to tweet the following just because I thought it embodied some things I really love about the lisp community:
"(loop (awhen (build-something) (release it))) ;; Wake up #lisp ers. Your time is now. This message brought to you in part by #quicklisp"
Nikodemus Siivola nailed this too at some point with the quote, "Schemer: “Buddha is small, clean, and serious.” Lispnik: “Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs.” Scott Fahlman's statement that "Common Lisp is politics, not art." seems similarly indicative of this in some ways also.
There are two things I'm really trying to get at. One is agnosticism, a very serious take on multi-paradigm, "you want it, you got it" programming. Opinionated languages are great as are languages or communities that are pursuing other goals, be they some abstract notion of elegance, minimalism or anything else. But...Common Lisp *is* a programmer amplifier. It subscribes to no preordained or predefined notion of what elegance is.[1] Hell, a recent article talked about 3 different kinds of languages you need to know and I might add an unopinionated language and an opinionated language to that list. Whatever the opinions you ought to see the difference.
My other point is the more important one, the emphasis both in the language and community on practicality, productivity and getting things done. People often show up on lisp.reddit or the #lisp channel on Freenode/IRC and ask if Lisp can has monads or Lisp does functional programming or if people have built big things with it and so on *before* trying to learn lisp or using it.[2] Almost always the first response is "Why are you asking that? Why does it matter? Why do you want to know?". This tends to dissatisfy the visitors whose real agenda, in my humble opinion, is usually to ensure they study the thing that will "make them good" or get them furthest ahead of the curve. Why waste your time with "the wrong language"?
Generally, the whole conversation devolves. The parties are coming from totally different points of inquiry. But whether the visitors are "flamed so hard they die" or gently dealt with until agreements are reached things end pretty quickly and everyone goes on about their day. Paul Snively calls lisp the "cockroach of programming languages" and I'm not sure if he means Common Lisp or just the Lisp family genes. But when people ask if lisp is dead or "shouldn't I just use/study language X?" I'm relieved and pleased that we're too busy having fun and building things to worry about it. Who cares what language wins tomorrow? This language works today, we're using it and when we see other languages with something we need, we grab it.
To me this is something refreshing about the lisp community that isn't internally or externally recognized quite enough. Which isn't to say that we should go around beating our chests and talking about what rock stars or great programmers we are. I'm certainly not one. I remain a wet behind the ears programmer. I'm not writing as much code as I should and as a consequence still have little useful stuff to release. But I've been privileged to watch and try to help Will Halliburton with a lisp-powered startup and work with Leslie Polzer on Weblocks and Paktahn.
Really it's most likely that there's so much more noise than signal regarding "lisp" and often so little clarity as to whether scheme, lisp or genetically 'lispy' languages are being discussed on online forums that the public image about Common Lisp is horribly out of whack. Hell, I've said terrible, stupid, ridiculous things about Common Lisp in the past. Why? I hadn't seen the community, I hadn't seen the language, I didn't understand *what* it was. And maybe we can't change that or it's just not worth the effort. The people who have heard something from x, who heard it from y, who heard it from z will keep repeating old wives' tales forever. But here's my attempt at getting down why this language is in no danger of dying anytime soon:
We're all just having fun building things. And if that sounds like something you'd like to do, please come in, visit #lisp and ask us questions. Message me personally if you want, I'm on freenode as redline6561. I promise the water is fine. Just don't ask if this is the right way to use your time. Figure that out in advance. As far as I'm concerned, between great open source implementations like SBCL and CCL, great editing solutions like SLIME for emacs, Slimv for vim and the new Textmate bundle and easy access to libraries through quicklisp, there's never been a better time.
[1] This certainly is not to say that you can't use or practice other languages notions of elegance in lisp. Drew Crampsie aka drewc has been perfectly happy working on a monadic web request dispatcher of late and Francois Rene Rideau aka fare happily does Purely Functional Programming in CL and came up with an "Interface Passing Style" which simulates the parametric polymorphism of Haskell's type classes.
[2]If you're doing that, you're missing the point. Part of the reason that happens is surely the endless blog articles and old reddit comments which endorse SICP and "learning lisp" as a way to expand your mind and reach some ersatz programming enlightenment. Part of it is that you might just be getting started in programming and looking for ways to skip to the end. And that's understandable, I've been there myself. But remember the words of Norvig and Nostrademons.
Unless otherwise credited all material 
by Brit Butler 