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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Programming
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I always find Lisp a bit mind bending and feel like I will be a better programmer once I master it. But it also feels like wood carving, and most of the time I just need to slap some planks together for a bookcase, and don't have the time to scrimshaw it into a beautiful work of art. I'm not seeing here how Lisp is differentiated from an agent with a code sandbox and python, unless we're operating that agent inside of Emacs... That's where the code and the data are swimming together. I don't think there isn't a difference, it's more a matter of my not getting it, if anyone is able to help me understand it'd be appreciated
You can implement an agent loop in any language, and modern languages can do everything that lisp can, so there's nothing magic in lisp. At the end of the day lisp is just another weakly typed functional/procedural language.
Personally I didn't find lisp that much elegant due to the loose typechecking and the excessive parentheses, but the macro system allows some very terse and smart (and mind-bending, as you said) solutions, which do feel pretty cool when they work fine.
IMHO it'd be probably better to give your agent access to a python interpreter because it's much more prevalent in the training data than lisp...
tbf high prevalence is a double edged sword, it also means it's trained on a lot of poorly written code which it will slide into