Comment by loufe

Comment by loufe 5 days ago

3 replies

AutoLISP is still my most fluent language, pleasantly surprised to see anything in it on HN. There's something fun about its idiosyncrasies, but I am genuinely so glad for modern IDEs, linters, tooling in just about every other environment. AutoCAD has severely neglected it, despite some large businesses built exclusively upon it.

holg 5 days ago

Still your most fluent - that says something about how the language shaped thinking. The neglect is real; Autodesk clearly wants everyone on .NET, but there's a lot of institutional knowledge and working code out there that just... works. Part of why I built this: preservation. If AutoLISP fades from AutoCAD entirely, at least the workflow can live on in the browser.

  • antod 5 days ago

    I cargo culted my way into AutoLISP in the R12 era knowing nothing about lisp or funtional programming (BASIC and a tiny bit of Pascal was all I'd done by then). Just using notepad without any assists like highlighting matching parentheses and no deeper theoretical knowledge was tough, but I could see vague outlines of a world of mathematical elegance just out of my grasp.

    • holg 4 days ago

      "Vague outlines of mathematical elegance just out of grasp" - that's exactly it. Notepad, no paren matching, just counting brackets by hand. The elegance was there, we just couldn't quite see it yet.