I hope it goes beside the syntax.
A few things (and for context this was 1996).
With the class I disliked they were trying to teach me a language and a complex concept at the same time. In a 4 month semester, half of it was spent just getting basically proficient in the language. So instead of learning one concept I'm learning 2. We were essentially using scheme to build a interpreter for a simplified scheme. I understand why we were implementing scheme, it's one of the simplest languages to implement and maps well to many concepts in CS. this is actually why the game studio I worked at used it, not that it was the right language, in fact it's caused a lot of trouble and they have a lot of c/python like in the language now
Scheme seemed like a pretty useless language as well. The book for it listed (in the forward) out how amazing it was and showed all the amazing projects done with lisp-like languages. That list started with emacs and then the rest was academic things I'd never heard of, which seemed like a joke. If I recall scheme had some pretty weak language library functions at the time as well. Also at the time I cared about drawing triangles on the screen.
[I will lose points for this but it's my POV] I tend to find people who strongly like functional languages a bit insufferable, especially academics. I tend to learn by getting a real world project done, and I like tools that let you build real world things. I don't care anywhere near as much about form of the solution. . Functional languages seem to gel better with people who care about the beauty of a simple proof. I hate proofs. Also in much of the work I've done, the folks who really pushed for functional languages didn't really understand that most of their coworkers were juts not capable of understanding those languages or thinking that logically. There's a reason (imho) that they're not as popular of languages.
I have written stuff in these languages since then. I did work in the (gp reference) scripting language and on its implementation in the engine. This got me real features (like a mission in an AAA game, and features for my mission designers in the engine). This seemed useful to me.
I spent about 3 months trying to use Clojure to do a highly parallel data processing work. It seemed to map well to the problem. However it was insufferably slow, and with required type hinting was essentially complicated java (lost the benefit). I re-wrote it in C++ in about a week and brought the processing time from 15 minutes to 32 seconds by leveraging the deeper parts of the machine (buffers, disk cache, physical cores) which were not as available inside the abstraction.
So it also comes down to I haven't found a problem that maps well to something like scheme that I need to solve. When I do stuff with interpreters I just grab ANTLR and java/go/c++. This is more maintainable for everyone I work with.
While I do admit that lisp/scheme/fp seek beauty.. it's also one thing I want in coding. Beautiful code. Not at the expense of practicality.. but still, look at how easy it is to be confused and make a mess trying to write a flatmap like procedure, while in lisp it's so trivial you never even think about it.
Thanks for the honesty and good job on making things fast.
For flatmap, looked up https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Flatten_a_list#Common_Lisp, this is just gibberish to me currently. Is this simple, or am I missing something?
I once had an discussion with someone who was a huge relational guy who could not understand dynamo (many have this issue). I asked him how to do a global postal address in a relational db. He proceeded to put out a ~5 table layout on the whiteboard from memory. Finished by saying of course there are other situations and you can handle them with X or Y. We went and grabbed a drink and I had him grab get a sde1 and explain that layout to the SDE1. I cut it off after 15 minutes. While it was OBVIOUS to him in his experience, it was in no way simple and the SDE1 (who was just starting multi-table joins) was taking a while to catch up. The sr eng was just used to relational. The model he had on the board was at least 30 years of iteration and best practices, practically it's own microservice. I drew it in dynamo where it's just PK:UserId, and then a bunch of optional columns. SDE1 grokked this right away.
I would love to know what types of apps / code / work you do that you really appreciate in lisp. As I said I'm always looking for a language to solve a problem. What class of applications do you use it for?
For instance I use C++ when I need to be near the metal (game engines, shaders, arduino). We use go at work but Scheme or Clojure might be better for the business logic we do (tho it'd be slower). Always wanted to use Erlang but I never got on the distributed chat program projects (I killed 2 acutally).
These are patterns that you can do in any language, but functional languages kind of compel you to follow them. Many people first learned these patterns from FP, and carry them over to OOP, which they have to write at work.
I don’t know if there are many problems that are elegantly defined for FP, as you suggest. I think people just get comfortable in their cages. :)
[edit] algos, over proofs, would probably be a better way to put it.
I can never tell what an index-juggling loop is doing, in whatever language (including Scheme).
But when you follow the data type case by case, each step is simple and logical, easy to comprehend so the whole solution is easy too.
