I get emacs, but WOW... the LISP learning curve ... and WHY LISP?

[sokoloff]

The big “win” in a DSL is if you can enable non-programmer domain experts to use it without them thinking they’re doing “programming”.

If it feels like programming, I tend to lean towards just giving the user the full power of the programming environment.

[tggzzz]

The big “win” in a DSL is if you can enable non-programmer domain experts to use it without them thinking they’re doing “programming”.

If, and it is a big if, that ever works then the programmes are trivial. When the users ask for "if then else" statements, you need to specify variables, then scope and lifetime, then what constitute equality, etc.

Who was it that said something to the effect that "if you allow people to program in English, then you will find people cannot write English"

If it feels like programming, I tend to lean towards just giving the user the full power of the programming environment.

See above

[brucehoult]

The big “win” in a DSL is if you can enable non-programmer domain experts to use it without them thinking they’re doing “programming”.

If it feels like programming, I tend to lean towards just giving the user the full power of the programming environment.

In a Lisp-like environment, there is no conflict between those two things. E.g. Scala with embedded Chisel DSL for chip circuit design, or Ruby with embedded Rails DSL for web site design.

You get the easy DSL, and you *also* have the full power of the programming language.

[sokoloff]

Node-red has a few deployed use cases that I’d say are successful in allowing non-programmers to program things they couldn’t achieve in a text-based programming environment.

[westfw]

I'm sure you remember why two of the most basic LISP functions are still CAR and CDR

Well, no.  I had to look it up.  I pretty much only go back to the PDP-10 era.
Those 36 bit machines with their 18bit address spaces were certainly convenient for LISP.  Byte-addressing, not so much :-(

[eti]

I'm now having a bash at "Racket", and wow, what a lovely dialect it is!

[tggzzz]

I'm sure you remember why two of the most basic LISP functions are still CAR and CDR

Well, no.  I had to look it up.  I pretty much only go back to the PDP-10 era.
Those 36 bit machines with their 18bit address spaces were certainly convenient for LISP.  Byte-addressing, not so much :-(

Luxury! I started on a 39-bit machine with a 13-bit address space (And a 576µs cycle time)