An Intuition for Lisp Syntax (2020)
Having played around with Clojure and Scheme for a while (but never got too serious), I always thought homoiconicity and macros were extremely cool concepts, but I never actually ran into a need for them in my everyday work.>Now, if we agree that the ability to manipulate source code is important to us, what kind of languages are most conducive for supporting it?This is useful for compiler programmers, or maybe also those writing source code analyzers/optimizers, but is that it? On occasion I have had to write DSLs for the user input, but in these cases the (non-programmer) users didn't want to write Lisp so I used something like Haskell's parsec to parse the data.The remote code example given in the post is compelling, but again seems a bit niche. I don't doubt that it's sometimes useful but is it reason enough to choose the language? Are there examples of real-life (non-compilers-related) Lisp programs that show the power of homoiconicity?Same goes with the concept of "being a guest" in the programming language. I have never wanted to change "constant" to "c". Probably I'm not imaginative enough, but this has never really been an issue for me. Perhaps it secretly has though, and some of my problems have been "being a guest" in disguise.