Antimemes

I remain unconvinced that Lisp's macro facilities are antimemetic. I am not sure exactly how to divide up my disagreement between "it's not antimemetic, it's something more mundane" and "I don't think you should use the exotic-sounding term 'antimeme' for something so mundane" because I am not exactly certain where you draw the boundaries of the term "antimeme".

At any rate, I think the main reasons why Lisp isn't more popular are fairly mundane and don't need an exotic-sounding term to describe them. I think (though I confess I don't have solid evidence) that:

• most programmers who don't use Lisp never even really look at it;
• most who look at it but still don't use it are mostly put off by superficial things like the unusual syntax or the Lisp community's reputation for smugness;
• most who get past those things but still don't use it are mostly put off by genuine drawbacks like the relatively poor selection of libraries available or the difficulty of finding good Lispers.

So if Lisp is tragically underused then some of the tragic underuse will be the result of defmacro (and also, I suggest, set-macro-character and set-dispatch-macro-character) being underappreciated, but I find it very hard to believe that it's a large fraction. And even that doesn't all qualify as antimemetic in the sense of "provoking a self-suppressing response", again unless you're meaning that so broadly that it covers everything whose merits are easy to underestimate. If someone is (say) used to C-preprocessor-style macros, and hears that expert Lisp programming makes a lot of use of macros, and imagines a codebase full of #defines, are you calling that antimemetic? Or if they don't jump to that conclusion but do think something like "hmm, macros aren't really all that powerful, so a language where macros provide a lot of the power must be pretty weak", are you calling that antimemetic?

I think the mental process you have in mind is different from both of those, because you're taking "macro" to include e.g. C's "if" and "for", even though those aren't implemented with any sort of macrology in C, so the reaction you're describing is more like "these people say that in Lisp you can redefine the language itself, but that doesn't make any sense". Again I have no concrete evidence, but I don't think that's a common reaction. After all, C does have macros (of a sort) and you can use them to extend the language (kinda), and users of Ruby, which is at least mainstream-ish, are used to using and making what they call "domain-specific languages" within Ruby even though what you can do there is fairly restrictive compared with Lisp's macros.

I think you're overdramatizing how people react to Lisp. "Lisp is an antimeme!" makes a great story, but I don't think it fits the evidence as well as "Lisp is unfamiliar in various ways, and people are bad at seeing the merits of unfamiliar things".

... Again, unless that or something like it is actually all you mean by "antimeme".

It seems, at least some of the time, as if you're using the term to describe anything whose widespread appreciation is limited by the fact that widespread beliefs or habits of mind get in the way. (Assuming that programming languages can't have adjustable syntax; seeing a clear boundary between one's self and the rest of the universe; being willing to have a boss and do what they say.) With that definition, I'm still not sure Lisp counts (as I said above, I think there are other reasons why many programmers don't use Lisp, and they aren't all antimemetic even in this very broad sense), but there's certainly a case to be made that it does -- but to me, "antimeme" doesn't seem like an appropriate term, for two reasons.

• It implies that the offputting-ness lies primarily in the thing itself, when in fact it seems much better to see it as a property of the people being put off.
• It makes "being an antimeme" sound like some exotic SCP-ish property, when in fact a large fraction of underappreciated things are "antimemes" in this sense.

For example, Python’s if and not are macros. You can’t write your own ifnot macro to abbreviate if and not because you’re not allowed to write your own macros.

Here's how you do it with the C preprocessor.

#define ifnot(x) if(!x)

You can apply this trick to any language with a textual representation, since preprocessing is a separate stage.

Awesome!

It would tend to have the effect of making most people give up on the idea of antimeme

Yes, that effect on most people is kinda in the nature of antimemes.

In a LW context I wouldn't paint the picture too black though. The average poster's epistemic standards are high. High enough to warrant a mindful reader's second look at the antimemes they're proposing.

The corresponding discussions would certainly not be frictionless. That doesn't mean they couldn't provide some high-value insight to a few people, though.

To me this looks like the stuff LW is all about. I mean, aren't we looking at low-hanging fruit hidden from vantage points of naive epistemology?

Any sane person could write up a list of antimemes, but no sane person would post it.

I really like this sentence. Writing about this antimemetic subjects is difficult because readers will often fixate on a particular example instead of refuting the central thesis. I'm growing to appreciate why Paul Graham wrote How to Disagree. He must get this kind of criticism all the time.

So lots of people are taking up LISP, and abandoning it as soon as they hit the dreaded defmacro? But are lots of people aren't taking up LISP. There are lot of reasons for not studying old, little-used languages. And it's not as if programmers are low-openness people who hate fundamentally new paradigms -- OO would never have spread if they were. For me, LISP pattern matches to "cult following" rather than "great thing that the sheeple can't understand".