Agreed. It's similar to music where you can reach proficiency with scales, and then stop thinking of them as rules but play with them as you see fit.
I believe that first the algol genealogy suffers from the ~difficulty of crossing metalevels, secondly, the people behind these languages were able to do so and see the language as a vehicle, a mean, not an end. But beginners see the finger, not the moon and end up thinking in terms of builtin constructs. Lisp being already unrelated to any machine, and with the serendipity of sexp easy homoiconicity you see swim in this universe of abstraction levels.
> Very few are able to move between abstraction levels, and those that do forget how it was their view of the world before they fully grasped it.
I enrolled Coursera MOOC teaching scheme and sml, watching many students being emotional (anger, despair) about interpretation (especially when circular) reminded me of myself in college. The worst part is that the best I could say was "keep trying, you will understand". I wanted to tell them about the beauty and the freedom you feel but our minds were too separate and my understanding not good enough yet.
I believe that first the algol genealogy suffers from the ~difficulty of crossing metalevels, secondly, the people behind these languages were able to do so and see the language as a vehicle, a mean, not an end. But beginners see the finger, not the moon and end up thinking in terms of builtin constructs. Lisp being already unrelated to any machine, and with the serendipity of sexp easy homoiconicity you see swim in this universe of abstraction levels.
> Very few are able to move between abstraction levels, and those that do forget how it was their view of the world before they fully grasped it.
I enrolled Coursera MOOC teaching scheme and sml, watching many students being emotional (anger, despair) about interpretation (especially when circular) reminded me of myself in college. The worst part is that the best I could say was "keep trying, you will understand". I wanted to tell them about the beauty and the freedom you feel but our minds were too separate and my understanding not good enough yet.