Alejandro Guillen?- Lisp makes me feel humble, I must become worthy of using it.
What led you to try Lisp?
I remember coming back from college everyday feeling like I hadn't learned anything worthy, I was deeply dissapointed with the education I was getting. How could it be that, after the first two programming courses there was nothing more to learn about programming?
Java was my first language, as you migth have guessed. At first I thought it was great, it was my first programming experience after all... Still, Java's limitations appeared to me from the beginning ; I remember seeing my teacher's duplicated code and asking her if there was a way to treat code as data, to generate code from a string or something like that, she just looked akwardly at me and said “That's not possible”.
I took my teacher's word for the truth and worried no more about such matters. Every once in a while I fantasized about that dream language and how amazing it would be, “maybe I'll write it some day...”
It wasn't until my last year in college that I found Ruby. After grasping the concepts of anonymous procedures and closures I realized my teachers had lied to me, plain and simple. I felt betrayed because all that time I spent programming in Java and C++ could have been spent learning Ruby. So I learned Ruby and had a blast doing it. I didn't remember having so much fun since.. ever!
The last semester before graduation I took a class called “Computational paradigms”. Out of four years only one class was dedied to covering everything from the turing machine to neural nets, prolog and lisp. Despite the little time we had to cover each subject it was enough to at least draw your curiosity. If I hadn't learned ruby, lisp would have probably passed unnoticed (as that weird language full of parenthesis that uses a lot of recursion), but because of my ruby background I was able to see past that apparent complexity: the most powerful language ever, the language of my dreams.
I started with “Practical Common Lisp”, a formidable book that showed me the full power of Lisp, then I moved on to “On Lisp”, a book that will change forever the way I think about programming, I haven't finished it yet.
How does Lisp make you feel?
Lisp makes me feel humble.
Lisp makes me feel free.
I feel like learning Lisp will be a life's effort, it will never end. That is the difference with other languages, there is a time when you can say: "I know all there is to know", in Lisp that doesn't happen, you can always go higher,the abstraction level has no limits, the only limit is your own mind.
How far do you think you have gone?
Human: Uses lisp's basics: tail recursion, commonly used functions...
Saiyan: Knows how to take advantage of passing functions as parameters.
Super Saiyan II: Knows how to take advantage of returning functions, masters simple macro definitions.
Super Saiyan III: Uses closures to build data structures.
Super Saiyan IV: Masters complex macros
?? ??
I think I am a Saiyan or Super Saiyan II rigth now, I still have a lot to learn...
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