>>42The wisest thing ever said on
/prog/ was that programming is demeaning. My kneejerk reaction was that this was wrong, but after puzzling over it for a few years, I can see the brilliance of it. Anonymous wasn't speaking of the nature of programming, or an idealized programming, or anything like that, he was speaking of programming as it is practiced. Programming in C or Java is not an mental exercise (though it too often is mental masturbation), it is a menial one. One does not create universes by fiddling with electrons, electrons are just a building block. Likewise, it is likely to be impossible for a human programmer to ever creating meaningful programs while he is tethered to the ground by his limited toolset. Languages like Scheme set the programmer free from the tedious shackles of manual memory management, and allow him to instantly begin exploring the beautiful side of programming. Lisp is a language for humans, C is a language for computers. To program in C (or any other low level language), one forces oneself to subsume the role of the computer, to become it. How is that fitting for great beings such as ourselves?