How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
On SICP and Lisp, I was recently asked:<p><pre><code>    &quot;Thanks a lot for this insightful reply! I&#x27;ve read about how 
    powerful are Lisp languages (for example for AI), my question is: 
    does Emacs really use all this theoretically powerful functionality 
    of these languages? In what way is this metalinguistic abstraction 
    used? In the built-in functions of Emacs, the powerful packages 
    made by the community, or the Elisp tweaking of a casual Emacs user 
    to customize it (or all three of those).

    I&#x27;ve read a lot of people praising and a lot of people despising 
    Elisp. Do these people who dislike Elisp do it because they want a 
    yet more powerful Lisp dialect (like Scheme) or because they want 
    to use a completely different language?

    PD: Excuse my ignorance, I&#x27;m still learning about programming. As a 
    side note, would you recommend me to read SICP if I just have small 
    notions of OOP with Python and Java and I want to learn more about 
    these topics? Will I be able to follow it?
</code></pre>
Let me start from the end: Reading SICP changed everything I thought I knew about programming and shattered any sort of non-empirical foundation - that I had built up to that point - regarding how my mind worked and how I interfaced with reality. It&#x27;s not just a book about programming, there are layers of understanding in there that can blow your worldview apart. That said, you do need to make an effort by paying attention when you go through the book and (mostly) doing the exercises. The videos on youtube are also worth watching in-parallel with reading the book. The less you know about programming when you go through SICP, the easier it will be for you to &quot;get&quot; it since you&#x27;ll have no hardwired - reinforced by the passage of time and investment of personal effort - prior notions of what programming is and how it should be done.<p>* Metalinguistic abstraction<p>Short answer: all three.<p>Long answer: The key idea behind SICP and the philosophy of Lisp is metalinguistic abstraction which can be described as coming up with and expressing new ideas by first creating a language that allows you to think about said ideas. Think about that for a minute.<p>It follows then that the &#x27;base&#x27; language [or interpreter in the classical sense] that you use to do that, should not get in your way and must be primarily focused in facilitating that process. Lisp is geared towards you building a new language on top of it, one that allows you to think about certain ideas, and then solve your problems in that language. Do you need all that power when you&#x27;re making crud REST apps or working in a well-trodden domain? Probably not. What happens when you&#x27;re exploring ideas in your mind? When you&#x27;re thinking about problems that have no established solutions? When you&#x27;re trying to navigate domains that are fuzzy and confusing? Well, that&#x27;s when having Lisp around makes a big difference because the language will not get in your way and it&#x27;ll make it as easy as possible for you to craft tools that let you reason effectively in said domains.<p>Let&#x27;s use Python as an example since you mentioned it. Python is not that language since it&#x27;s very opinionated and constrained by its decisions in the design space and, additionally, has been deliberately created with entirely different considerations in mind (popular appeal). This is very well illustrated by the idiotic Python moto &quot;There&#x27;s only one way to do it&quot; which, in practice, isn&#x27;t even the case for Python itself. A perfect example of style over substance, yet people lap it up. You can pick and choose a few features that superficially seem similar to Lisp features but that does not make Python a good language for metalinguistic abstraction. This is a classic example of the whole of Lisp being much more than the sum of its parts, and in reality languages like Python don&#x27;t even do a good job of reimplementing some of these parts. This is the reason I don&#x27;t want to just list a bunch of Lisp features that factor into metalinguistic abstraction (e.g. macros and symbols).<p>* Feedback loops<p>The other key part of Lisp and also something expressed fully by the Lisp machines is the notion of a cybernetic feedback loop that you enter each time you&#x27;re programming. In crud, visual terms:<p>[Your mind - Ideas] &lt;--&gt; Programming Language &lt;--&gt; [Artifact-in-Reality]<p>You have certain ideas in your mind that you&#x27;re trying to manipulate, mold and express through a programming language that leads to the creation of an artifact (your program) in reality. As you see from my diagram, this is a bidirectional process. You act upon (or model) the artifact in reality but you&#x27;re also acted upon by it (iterative refinement). The medium is the programming language itself. This process becomes much more effective the shorter this feedback loop gets. Lisp allows you to deliberately shorten that feedback loop so that you _mesh with your artifact in reality_. Cybernetic entanglement if you will. Few other languages do that as well as Lisp (Smalltalk and Forth come to mind). Notice that I emphasized your mind and reality&#x2F;artifact in that previous diagram, but not the medium, the programming language. I did that in order to show that the ideal state is for that programming language not to exist at all.<p>* Differences between Lisps<p>All Lisps allow you to express metalinguistic abstraction (they wouldn&#x27;t be Lisps otherwise). Not all Lisps allow you to shorten the feedback loop with the same efficiency.<p>The Lisps that best do the latter come out of the tradition of the Lisp machines. Today this means Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp (they&#x27;re very similar and you can get most of what Common Lisp offers on the language level in Emacs Lisp today). For that reason, I don&#x27;t think Scheme is more powerful than Emacs Lisp, since Scheme lacks the focus on interactivity and is very different to both CL and Emacs Lisp.<p>As far as other people&#x27;s opinions go, my rule of thumb is that I&#x27;d rather educate myself about the concepts and form my own opinions than blindly follow the herd. Which is why I also think that people who are sufficiently impressed by an introduction to Lisp (such as the OP article) to want to learn it and ask &quot;Which Lisp should I learn? I want something that is used a lot today&quot; are completely missing the point. 
You&#x27;ll notice that most programming today is done for money, in languages that are geared towards popularity and commoditization. For me, programming is an Art or high philosophy if we take the latter to stand for love of wisdom. And as someone has said, philosophical truths are not passed around like pieces of eight, but are lived through praxis.<p>P.S. The talk by Gerry Sussman (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...</a>) that I saw mentioned in HN yesterday provides an excellent demonstration of metalinguistic abstraction and also serves as an amalgamation of some of my other ideas about Lisp.