I can't believe it! Mainstream articles are throwing around s-exps like they were "normal" pseudo-code. Thank you Clojure for making Lisp acceptable :-)
In the process making it obfuscated and unreadable to a large audience.
I realize it may be an unpopular opinion around here, but large herds of programmers around the world does not know Lisp, have no intention in learning it and see no potential value in doing so either. To them this code is greek covered in parenthesis.
I know lots of great programmers real life. Not a single one of them knows Lisp. To me Lisp is about obscure as languages gets and the only place I see it mentioned is here and on proggit every now. COBOL would definitely not be my language of choice for anything, but at least I can trust that people will know what I'm talking about if I mention it.
If you want to communicate to an audience, putting spikes on the chairs is in general a bad idea.
Not trying to put the language down, but I see no compelling reason to learn it and use it over what I know now. I don't see what it has to offer which would seemingly would require me to relearn programming from scratch, so I'm not going to put in the effort.
That is not to say I don't take interest in learning new languages, just that Lisp is not on the list, and nobody has yet provided me with a good reason why it should be.
There are lots of great programmers out there, most of them not knowing Lisp. If you don't want to cater to them, fine, but don't be surprised when you find yourself lacking an audience.
You don't need to know much lisp beyond ( + 2 3) returns 5 to follow the example on one slide in set of 55 slides(assuming you know someting about STM). If you don't know that, you wouldn't get much from the slides anyway and will have to do some reading of your own.
Besides it is a set of slides. The actual presentation consists of more than the slides. If you were there yo could ask the presenter to explain what is happening.
Anyone who can't do that (or be bothered to take the time to spend 10 minutes reading a tutorial on any lisp) should either (a) look at the rest of the slides (all 54 of them) or (b) go do something else.
the slide seems to be partly a survey of concurrency constructs in several languages. How do you expect the presenter to present examples of concurrent language code without using code from those languages?
" but I see no compelling reason to learn it and use it over what I know now. I don't see what it has to offer which would seemingly would require me to relearn programming from scratch, so I'm not going to put in the effort."
This is your choice. Just don't whine that other people are using languages they know to show code examples.
"but don't be surprised when you find yourself lacking an audience."
you (as in someone who was not there for his presentation, reading this on HN long after the presentation and who "cannot be bothered to learn" lisp ) is obviously not his audience.
So what?
He made some slides for a presentation and was generous enough to put those slides on line. . There are no "spikes on seats". You weren't there in the audience.
Looking at your comment, I went back and skimmed trough all the slides in there, and realize I after seeing the comment here on HN that I thought all the examples would be Lisp-like and skipped the slides before seeing the rest.
You're right. My bad. Sorry. I blame early morning and lack of coffee.
> I know lots of great programmers real life. Not a single one of them knows Lisp.
That's a good way to know they're not actually great programmer. Good maybe, but not great.
Any great programmer will have at least a basic ability to read (if not use) lisps, because he'll have looked at a few dialects to know what it was about.
