I hate Lisp

<i>This</i> is exactly what I've been complaining about lately. Hacker News seems to have been mobbed with people who have zero sense of humor and no ability to recognize satire. Hackers like to laugh. They like to laugh at <i>themselves</i> most of all.<p>I've noticed this trend for the past couple of months...comments and articles that are clearly intended humorously being voted down as trolls, or responded to as trolls, or both. I know we're supposed to be politely nudging these new users onto the path of righteousness and into becoming productive members of the HN community...but how does one teach someone to have a sense humor? I really don't want to be one of those Eternal September types, but hackers like to laugh.

I'm pretty sure the title is tongue in cheek, and would be more accurately rendered as "I hated lisp when I first had to learn it", considering e.g. the name of the blog, and posts like these with considerable lispy content.<p><a href="http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/01/day-4-part-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/01/day-4-part-1.html</a><p>I hate explaining a joke as much as anyone but it seems that it's gone over some heads.

<i>Why would someone lookup a value in a property list when you could write a simple routine in Macro-11 that would find the value in a table?</i><p>Why indeed! I'm glad Lisp is finally dead so that we can all go back to writing assembler code optimised for the cycle allocations of a specific cpu. If only we could get back all the time wasted writing all that silly code with all those silly parentheses!

I know it's a joke article, but I still find it pointless and without substance. What can anyone learn from it?

The main point he seems to be making is that LISP is terribly inefficient from an early 80s point of view because there's an abstraction layer between LISP code and the CPU.<p>These days of course that's a moot point, as almost all day-to-day code is implemented in a language that has such a layer. Ruby has a VM with multiple implementations, Java has JVMs, C# has the Microsoft dotNet runtime and Mono, etc.<p>I can't really tell whether or not this post is supposed to be funny but I'm guessing that the only reason this made the front page is because of the polarizing title.

I don't hate Lisp but I do agree that in those days limited stack depth was a problem. I don't know if this is an accurate assessment of Lisp but I think of pure Lisp as language where all of the data is stored entirely in the call stack. In other words it's just functions and arguments piled up in a stack. Is that right?

Sounds like a construction worker enrolling in an architecture class. It would be baffling. The author doesn't seem to acknowledge the value of processes abstracted from laying bricks. My guess is that he hasn't faced many ad-hoc buildings.

What, nobody wants to piss on PG's beloved language?<p>Well, I DO hate Lisp and I'll tell you why. Syntactically speaking is the ugliest of all. I don't deny its inner beauty but those parenthesis are a stopper for me.<p>Look, nowadays we have powerful IDEs that help programmers do their job. How about an editor that subtly hides the parenthesis so they are out of the way when you don't need them?<p>Maybe then I would consider it, meantime no, I don't want to be cool.

Never mind, I hate Haskell. And since I'm too lazy to learn it, I'll hate it maybe forever...

die hard ASM fan hates higher level languages, news at 11.<p>is it me or is HN getting worse by the day?