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aidenn0 5 hours ago

I've been programming in Common Lisp for a quarter century and that list item made me cringe.

kazinator 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm into Lisp because Lisp languages are easy to work in. I advocate the family as being good for nonprogrammers.

Small children should learn some kind of Lisp, and easily can.

Richard Stallman famously shared an anecdote in the article "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html) about the secretaries:

> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

People, whether inside or outside of Lisp, who spread myths that that it is some scary, esoteric elite family of languages, have been pretty harmful.

deterministic 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Game designers in the games industry use Lua (and other script languages) all the time without being programmers. That doesn't mean that those languages are more "elite" than others.

Also, I taught myself machine code programming when I was 11. Just using a book (no help, no internet). So don't underestimate what kids can learn.