Lisp and the Transcendental

​I'm one of the world's most committed anti-religious people. Despite decades at organ consoles in churches and cathedrals, I stand with Hitchens: religion is humanity's adolescent phase, something we need to outgrow. Its influence is fundamentally harmful.

But when I read something like How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language, I completely understand the reverence the author describes. There's something about Lisp – and Clojure – that creates what you can only call a transcendental response. Nothing actually transcendental happens, of course, but the feeling is real.

What Lisp gives you is freedom. I've written about 'windsurfing through parentheses' before, and the metaphor sticks because it captures something essential. Most programmers are chained to the oars of enterprise slave galleys, with CTOs yelling 'RAMMING SPEED!' like that brilliant scene from Ben-Hur. Meanwhile, those of us who've found Lisp are windsurfing in circles around them, enjoying a freedom they can barely imagine.

The discovery feels like Dave Bowman meeting the monolith: 'My God... it's full of stars!' That vertigo when you realise this thing's inner dimensions vastly exceed its outer ones. Lisp isn't transcendental, but it works like a star gate in both senses. The language doesn't get in your way, and it opens new ways of thinking. At the same time, it's so simple that complexity becomes manageable.

I remember that August 1979 BYTE magazine perfectly. The cover promised mysteries, the articles delivered. I couldn't wait to start implementing what they described – eventually doing it in 6502 assembler, using an assembler I'd written in BASIC.

Everything clicked, even as a teenager. This was real freedom, expressed as code.

Years later, I wrote HotLisp (or 'HotLips' – M.A.S.H. was huge then) for the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. It was incredibly ambitious: a full Common Lisp that treated MIDI events as first-class citizens. Looking back, I see this as the beginning of what became Igor Engraver – integrating music directly into the computational core. We used it to control our Synclavier and MIDI synths whilst teaching algorithmic composition to advanced students at the Royal Academy.

The Two-Bit History article nails something important about Lisp's mystique. It traces the evolution from McCarthy's 'elegant mathematical system' through AI research, Lisp machines, and SICP's role in making it the language that 'teaches you programming's hidden secrets'. Each phase built the reputation.

What the article doesn't cover is the educational betrayal that followed. Computer science departments got it right for a while – they taught Scheme as a first language because it let students focus on learning algorithms rather than wrestling with syntax. Pure freedom to think about problems. Then Java Enterprise was foisted upon the world, the departments caved in, and they started churning out galley slaves instead of computer scientists. I see this as nothing short of high treason.

But here's what really matters: that freedom has evolved in Clojure. Rich Hickey didn't just bring Lisp to the JVM – he solved problems that even Common Lisp couldn't handle elegantly. Those immutable data structures aren't academic toys; they're game changers that eliminate whole categories of bugs whilst making concurrency and parallelism natural instead of terrifying. The effects ripple out: undo/redo becomes trivial, and the JVM gives genuine multi-platform reach.

This isn't just improvement – it's architectural breakthrough disguised as evolution. Clojure keeps Lisp's essential quality (that feeling of discovering how programming should work) whilst solving modern problems McCarthy couldn't have anticipated.

The poor souls in corporate Java shops keep rowing, occasionally granted small mercies as functional concepts trickle in – hints of the freedom they're missing.

I wish they could experience what we know: programming doesn't have to feel like industrial labour. There's a way of working where ideas flow directly into code, where the language becomes transparent, where you stop fighting tools and start windsurfing through solutions.

Maybe that's the point. As McCarthy noted in 1980, Lisp survives not because programmers grudgingly accept it as the best tool for each job, but because it hits 'some kind of local optimum in programming language space'. It endures even though most programmers never touch it, sustained by reports from those who've experienced its particular form of computational enlightenment.

Until we can imagine God creating the world with some newer language – and I doubt that day is coming soon – Lisp isn't going anywhere.

Read the full article at Two-Bit History: https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html