A Tale of Two Lisps: Speech Impediments vs. Programming Languages
Description
A screenshot of a comment thread from the 'r/explainlikeimfive' subreddit, displayed in dark mode. The first comment from user '_JasonDerulo' says, 'My sister and I have the same voice, the only way you can tell us apart on the phone is she has a very slight “s” lisp. We even have the same giggle.' A second user, 'YnarErsom,' replies, 'What other kinds of lisps are there?'. The third comment, from user 'atkulp,' which has received a Silver Award, cleverly pivots the topic by responding, 'Arc, Hy, Nu, Liskell, and LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang).' The humor arises from the deliberate misinterpretation of 'lisps.' While the original context refers to a speech impediment, the reply lists various dialects of the Lisp programming language. This is a sophisticated pun that appeals to developers, especially those familiar with the history and family of Lisp languages, known for their influence on functional programming
Comments
8Comment deleted
The original Lisp is the COBOL of functional programming; everyone knows it exists, but the only people who use its modern dialects are either academics or someone trying to be clever in a Reddit thread
There are three lisps: interdental, lateral, and the one where every sentence accrues so many parentheses the speech therapist asks if your tongue supports tail-call optimization
The real impediment is trying to count all those parentheses in production - though after 20 years, you realize the speech therapist was actually teaching you tail recursion all along
The beauty of this exchange is that it perfectly captures the Lisp community's self-awareness: we've created so many dialects that even explaining them requires distinguishing between 'speech lisp' and 'Lisp the language family.' It's the programming equivalent of 'Who's on First?' - except instead of baseball players, we're tracking whether you mean the S-expression-based functional paradigm, the specific Common Lisp standard, or one of the dozen modern variants that promise to finally make Lisp mainstream (narrator: they won't). At least with LFE, you get Erlang's concurrency model wrapped in parentheses - because clearly what the BEAM VM was missing was more nesting
When ELI5 hits Lisp genealogy: Arc to LFE, no circular cons cells in the family tree
Only in dev land does a speech lisp escalate into a BEAM-vs-JVM macro debate about homoiconicity
Only developers hear “she has a slight s lisp” and immediately ask which dialect - Common, Scheme, or LFE - then propose the standard fix: add more parentheses
Cool, someone knows what Hy is Comment deleted