Pragma conf was a lot of fun! I met loads of new and old friends, which led to meaningful conversations about what we do, what we sometimes feel we should do, and what we want to do.
One such conversation, with Chris Eidhof, was about how we think about programming. It was brought to mind again recently by Derek Jones’s post on Lisp and functional programming languages. His description of the Lisp community reminds me a lot of my own post on the tankard brigade, in that what keeps Lisp going is the exclusivity, and the need to know arcane rules to get things done when non-purists have much easier means to the same end.
What intrigues me about that is that it puts me into the tankard brigade, which gives me a lot to reflect on. When I look at Lisp I see a parsimony, a lack of arbitrary rules. It looks like there’s a single underlying metaphor, and everything in my solution can be expressed through that metaphor (no matter how I solved the problem). I look at Lisp and see functions. I look at Io or Self and see messages. But when I look at supposedly more accessible languages I see a bag of edge cases and special “oh, you want to do that? No, you need one of these” conditions, with no metaphor.
