Ask HN: Why is everyone here so obsessed with Lisp?
CRANK

It's elegant. It's (relatively) easy to write a basic parser. LISP code is readily expressible in the same basic data structures provided in the language so you get meta programming almost for free and thus extending LISP is (relatively) easy too. Whereas C feels like an abstract machine language, LISP feels like an abstract 'mathematical computation' language. It's, like all languages, a different way of thinking about computation in the same way that human languages also seem to be (at least marginally) different ways of representing or expressing thought.And once you've come to appreciate it, jokes like "HAVE YOU READ YOUR SICP TODAY?" will be funny to you.In terms of 'getting shit done', it's not so 'good', not that one can't get shit done with LISP, but that it's not necessary nor, given all likely real world constraints, particularly that much of, if at all, an advantage relative to other (families of) languages.It's also historically important so there's a benefit in knowing ab…

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