There's a lot in this article that I really identify with: the preference for a functional style (even if I'm just not smart enough to do the whole ultra-abstract symbol soup Haskell thing); the comfort I feel leaning on the compiler; "it also always feels like I’m tricking Lisp into doing what I want, rather than simply expressing what I want" feels like it came right from my brain.
God, Lisp...the core language isn't exactly that interesting in this day-and-age. Dynamic typing, garbage collection, anonymous functions, this has been the bread-and-butter of Python, JS, Ruby, etc. developers for like 20 years now. It's got some really powerful features like conditions and CLOS. But then the bulk of the language and library built on top is such a mess: it's missing so much basic functionality, but also has so many niche functions that can be configured every which way with niche keyword arguments, and they all turned out to be evolutionary dead-ends and much worse than what the rest of the world settled on (actually CLOS probably falls into this category too). I think it's this, more than anything, that makes programming in Lisp feel like an act of trickery rather than clear thinking.
But I'll also say that I've been hobby programming in Lisp a bit recently and, despite that, I've been finding it immensely pleasurable, the first time I've really enjoyed working with a computer in years. The highly interactive, image-based workflow is just so much smoother than my day job, where I'm constantly jumping between VSCode and Chrome and a console and manually rebuilding and sitting around waiting...
Macros may be a double-edged sword - they encourage monstrosities like LOOP, rather than building more powerful/regular/comprehensible language features like iterators or comprehensions. BUT when paired with that interactive development experience, it really feels like you're in a dialogue with the computer, building out a little computational universe.
God, Lisp...the core language isn't exactly that interesting in this day-and-age. Dynamic typing, garbage collection, anonymous functions, this has been the bread-and-butter of Python, JS, Ruby, etc. developers for like 20 years now. It's got some really powerful features like conditions and CLOS. But then the bulk of the language and library built on top is such a mess: it's missing so much basic functionality, but also has so many niche functions that can be configured every which way with niche keyword arguments, and they all turned out to be evolutionary dead-ends and much worse than what the rest of the world settled on (actually CLOS probably falls into this category too). I think it's this, more than anything, that makes programming in Lisp feel like an act of trickery rather than clear thinking.
But I'll also say that I've been hobby programming in Lisp a bit recently and, despite that, I've been finding it immensely pleasurable, the first time I've really enjoyed working with a computer in years. The highly interactive, image-based workflow is just so much smoother than my day job, where I'm constantly jumping between VSCode and Chrome and a console and manually rebuilding and sitting around waiting...
Macros may be a double-edged sword - they encourage monstrosities like LOOP, rather than building more powerful/regular/comprehensible language features like iterators or comprehensions. BUT when paired with that interactive development experience, it really feels like you're in a dialogue with the computer, building out a little computational universe.