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One of the things that slows me down is that whenever I see Lisp code, my mind goes to the equivalent Haskell code, and the comparison is basically never favorable.

I'm a firm believer in the value of learning a functional language, and I totally understand that from a historical perspective Lisp is important, but does it really have much to recommend it over modern functional langauges?




Lisp goes for its simplicity and metaprogramming power. I wouldn't recommend anybody to learn functional programming in it.


This is clojure so it seems damned modernish


You can write functional code in Lisp. But Lisp isn't really a functional language. That is, you have to kind of fight the language to write non-functional code in Haskell. In Lisp, you don't.

So if you learn Lisp, you learn a language that transcends programming style. It's much more universal than Haskell.


if you learn Lisp, you very quickly learn to lean heavily on macros, which is very much a programming style.


> my mind goes to the equivalent Haskell code

yup, I was doing this too.

notice also he did give a nod/mention in the post


Yeah, Church-encoding is a lot nicer to use when you can wrap the function in a new type.




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