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Why I Hate LISP So *MUCH*

Why do I hate LISP so much?

Because it makes me think so damned hard.

I cannot remember who said that compared to most other languages used to solve problems, LISP is more akin to DNA that allows you to build a language to solve problems. Maybe it was me a second ago. I think not. Too deft a summary for one such as me.

Either way, once you get sucked into the LISP world all other languages suddenly seem like so much code-bloat and syntactic-sugar coated Quaaludes. What do I mean by that? I mean that, oh hell, this guy put it nicely…

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I’ve seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

– Philip Greenspun, March 2007

That sums it up pretty nicely for me. Instead of sitting down and battering out reams of code in your favourite language, LISP actually has this really irritating (at first!) way of actually stopping you in your tracks and then making you completely and utterly frustrated at your own lack of progress in solving what appears to be a seemingly trivial problem.

LISP *forces* you to fully and completely comprehend what you are trying to solve. I think… DAMMIT!

And that hurts. Whereas in your ‘blub’ language you can sit comfortably and hack your way into / out-of anything that comes along, there is something so truly stunning about the absolute simplicity of LISP that it leaves you feeling intellectually naked and exposed and did I mention it also makes you feel like you just forgot everything you thought you know about writing code ?!

LISP is the TAO!

So, take me for example. I learned to program in CESIL at age 11 on a 280Z and went from there. Z80, 6502, dozens more. Then onto UCSD-Pascal, C, then later C++. Then Java. Then Smalltalk. STOP!

In the year 1998 I met a guy on a contract called Neil Dyer and he got me interested in Smalltalk, Squeak to be precise. Over many a jacket potato and tuna in the on-site cafeteria, over a period of two and a half-years I gradually realised that as the project architect he was trying to build a Smalltalk object engine with MS VC++ 6. We kind of succeeded but I finished that role with two things on mind:

1. it would have been easier to use Smalltalk but politics meant MSVC was ‘safer’.
2. Smalltalk was awesome for its small syntax and light-years ahead of the rest of the pack with its IDE / environment.

I then spent the next couple of years honing my Squeak (and Visual Works) skills and I peaked with a real-time interactive video game I wrote for children based on the traditional game of Hangman. It had a 110,000 word dictionary, sounds, graphics the lot. (Morphic is amazing!). I have a copy of Mark Guzdials Squeak book ane ‘the other’ book, they may be valuable one day!

Sadly though, it became apparent that for a myriad of reasons, Smalltalk had kind of missed the boat for world-wide domination on the scale of other languages like PHP, Ruby, Perl etc etc. I am not going to get into reasons as I don’t have the time or the inclination!

Then one day, while I was slurping blogs and reading stuff about Smalltalk I found this quote from Alan Kay, the inventor of the Smalltalk language, about LISP…

the greatest single programming language ever designed
– Alan Kay

I was knocked me for six! I immediately stopped what I was reading and went of to find out more. And that dear friends is where it all went wrong for me! Since then, having to use PHP on a daily basis feels more and more like sweeping the roads. It needs doing but I would rather it was someone else doing it. LOL.