As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros)
started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to
music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm:
development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc..
The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure
python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from.
Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me
define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart
read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though.
The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships
in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))
Comments
As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros) started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm: development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc.. The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from. Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though. The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))