The programmers who live in Flatland

Summary

In the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a two-dimensional world called “Flatland” is inhabited by polygonal creatures like triangles, squares, and circles. The protaganist, a square, is visited by a sphere from the third dimension. He struggles to comprehend the existence of another dimension even as the sphere demonstrates impossible things. It’s a great book that has stuck with me since I first read it almost 30 years ago. I’ve realized that “Flatland” is a perfect metaphor for the state of mind of a large number of programmers. Consider this: in 2001 Paul Graham, one of the most influential voices in tech, wrote the essay Beating the Averages. He argues forcefully about Lisp being fundamentally more powerful than other languages and credits Lisp as the key reason why his startup Viaweb outlasted their competitors. He identifies macros as the particularly distinguishing capability of Lisp. He writes: A big chunk of our code was doing things that are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software did things our competitors’ software couldn’t do. Maybe there was some kind of connection. I encourage you to follow that thread. I did follow that thread, and that essay is a key reason why Clojure has been my primary programming language for the past 15 years. What Paul Graham described about the power of macros was absolutely true. Yet evidently very few shared my curiosity and Lisp/Clojure are used by a tiny percentage of programmers worldwide. How can this be? Many point to “ecosystems” as the barrier, an argument that’s valid for Common Lisp but not for Clojure, which interops easily with one of the largest ecosystems in existence. So many misperceptions dominate, especially the reflexive reaction that the parentheses are “weird”. Most importantly, you almost never see these perceived costs weighed against Clojure’s huge benefits. Macros are the focus of this post, but Clojure’s approach to state and identity is also transformative. The scale ...