I recently wrote:
It's a bit unfortunate how Hollywood hijacked the word "hacker", the way labeling Richard Stallman or Ymir Vigfússon to a non-technical person as "hackers" and they start thinking of them hitting a computer keyboard at 120fps doing cybercriminal activity.
I was exploring Wikipedia's list of hackers. It's full of computer scientists, hackers, but also cybercriminals. Richard Stallman has a great article on what's hacking: On Hacking.
Nice quote from Abstract Heresies: Why vibe code in Lisp? about how Lisp is designed: Most modern languages force you to describe exactly how a machine should shuffle bits around. Lisp was designed as a language for expressing high-level abstractions rather than expressing tedious implementation details. When I prompt the AI, I want it generating architectural logic, not fighting with boilerplate just to manage basic state.
I would love to give some examples to this argument. Let's say you will count things in Go:
words := []string{"cat", "dog", "cat", "bird", "dog", "cat"}
counts := make(map[string]int)
for _, word := range words {
counts[word]++
}
We create a map, we iterate through the collection and extract the elements, then we use it as a key and mutate the counter. That's "mechanical state management". In Lisp, you could write:
(loop with counts = (make-hash-table :test #'equal)
for word in '("cat" "dog" "cat" "bird" "dog" "cat")
do (incf (gethash word counts 0))
finally (return counts))
Still imperative and not magically eliminating all the mechanics, but you can still build on this the abstraction that tells "group these things and count them".
There's this nice one too;
Designed for the Elite Let’s be honest: Lisp is a language designed by and for elite hackers, not for the masses. It doesn't hold your hand, and it doesn't pander to lowest-common-denominator programming bootcamp patterns. When you use it as a target language, you are operating in an environment built for maximum expressiveness.
I had a bad writing before about Lisp's superiority: Thoughts on languages. #Programming #Lisp