Re:The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem
by iLemming on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:11PM
(#50384500)
It's ridiculous how stubborn programmers could be. They'd cling to their beloved Blub paradigms and almost cultishly refuse to accept clearly pragmatic takes, sitting just in front of their eyes.
Of course, there's no tool without flaws. Nevertheless, oh boy, how amazingly practical Lisp-dialects can be in reality (even with all their imperfections), it's just astounding. Sometimes I think maybe it is some kind of ego-defeating stance or whatever, maybe smart programmers just can't believe how the stupidly simple idea of Lisp can ever satisfy their galaxy-sized brains? To me, Lisp is like a boundless sea of incredible idea generation on the spot, turning it into practical reality like some magic. Effortlessly, painlessly, and with joy.
I don't know, maybe I had to go through the pain of learning the intricacies of a dozen different stacks, using them for years, only to discover Lisp later in my life. Perhaps I wouldn't know the difference otherwise?
Just the other day, I was watching a YT video, which I of course fully control directly from Emacs - that is very useful for taking notes. I can mute, pause, speed-up, rewind, toggle subs, etc. All while typing a message, a note, or while looking at a PR diff. I thought, "hmm, floating window would be nice". Without even missing a beat, I opened eca-emacs buffer, I didn't even have to type the prompt - I used speech-recognition. Agent then connected to my WMs REPL, tapped into the mpv, analyzed things on the fly and just built the solution, right there. I didn't even have to compile, restart, reload, refresh anything.
It's almost as if Lisp has been quietly waiting for this moment. LLMs and Lisp REPLs make such a great duo - if you're a programmer and haven't seen it in practice yet, you should seriously be experiencing deep FOMO right now.
Of course, there's no tool without flaws. Nevertheless, oh boy, how amazingly practical Lisp-dialects can be in reality (even with all their imperfections), it's just astounding. Sometimes I think maybe it is some kind of ego-defeating stance or whatever, maybe smart programmers just can't believe how the stupidly simple idea of Lisp can ever satisfy their galaxy-sized brains? To me, Lisp is like a boundless sea of incredible idea generation on the spot, turning it into practical reality like some magic. Effortlessly, painlessly, and with joy.
I don't know, maybe I had to go through the pain of learning the intricacies of a dozen different stacks, using them for years, only to discover Lisp later in my life. Perhaps I wouldn't know the difference otherwise?
Just the other day, I was watching a YT video, which I of course fully control directly from Emacs - that is very useful for taking notes. I can mute, pause, speed-up, rewind, toggle subs, etc. All while typing a message, a note, or while looking at a PR diff. I thought, "hmm, floating window would be nice". Without even missing a beat, I opened eca-emacs buffer, I didn't even have to type the prompt - I used speech-recognition. Agent then connected to my WMs REPL, tapped into the mpv, analyzed things on the fly and just built the solution, right there. I didn't even have to compile, restart, reload, refresh anything.
It's almost as if Lisp has been quietly waiting for this moment. LLMs and Lisp REPLs make such a great duo - if you're a programmer and haven't seen it in practice yet, you should seriously be experiencing deep FOMO right now.