Coming up with languages like C++ and Delphi and Java, my mind was kinda blown when I first saw Scheme.
You could just put (print "Hello word") in a file and that worked. That’s the start and end of it. Implicit name space declaration, return type, argument type, return values, main argument. No need for the Black Maria, goodbye to the Brixton sun.
Lisp had other good things that I liked, like a consistent VSO order (I’d always been weirded out by the operator / procedure distinction) and first class functions, which I had never seen before and solved a lot of things.
Above anything else, the first thing I was into with Lisp was the lack of boilerplate. I could just get right into semantics.
I tried to tell others about this but they weren’t into it, because unlike me, they actually like code. They like explicitness, they like verbosity, they like type annotations, they like churning out SLOC like there’s no tomorrow.
They love boilerplate so much so that they’ve now made an AI to write it for them.