Zach Beane wrote: > What are some of the things that triggered your own Aha! moments? What > sort of stuff delighted you when you discovered it? What advice would > you give people who want to have more Aha! moments?
My initial encounter with lisp was through a capital/article in hofstadters metamagical themas, after which i promptly started writing an email to a friend of mine, in which i tried to cramp as many parenthesis as possible. I didn't program at the time and was mainly fascinated with those parens which neatly closed off one meaning from the other.
A few years back i started dabbling in a few sub-par programming languages, searching for one that stuck. I came across some emacs code. I tried to make sense out of it, but to no avail. It was the first time that i was absolutely sure that i could finally scratch a programming language off my to learn list. Ridiculous language.
Then, a year and a few months ago, i stumbled upon lisp again, and i got an aha moment, which was at the same time an aha erlebnis. Those sweet parens soothed the mind and burned it at the same time. No or { or = or . or -> or * or order of evaluation that snoops the mind from processor power and focus. I'm a simple person,with simple needs. I like my programming language straight and smooth, like Beyonce likes her hair. Later of course you learn about all these wicked toys like macros and clos. It blows your mind and all, but underneath it all it's that kind of weird satisfying calmness that comes over me when i securely lock up yet another statement in a closing paren. For my atheist mind it's the closest i ever came to what i guess should be a mystic experience. (hmm... one gets into some assumption problems in that last sentence.)
