I'm medically diagnosed autistic. I struggle with a lot. But some upsides I've encountered:
I tend to form stronger empathy and justice models, and commit to them wholly. This has allowed me to, for instance, work on improving access to benefits or healthcare for others while other people around me burn out. But I often fight way too long, and I get upset when people disagree.
I often hyperfocus on projects I'm interested in and can produce a high level of output if given an interesting task.
I enjoy counting, categorization, and organization tasks. Find all bugs that meet these rules, or, double check every unit test to check we're meeting coverage goals. Give me those tedious, repeatable, rules based gardening tasks and I'll churn through them all day every day.
I believe I have a more systemic way of thinking than my peers, and while this does cause problems sometimes it also enables me to decompose systems more easily.
I tend to maintain my cool under pressure or bullying. I simply do not notice nor care about emotionally loaded conversations. This causes problems often but also helps often, I can mediate with "we're here now, let's focus on how to improve".
These, of course, are not the upsides of every autistic person. They are my upsides for me. Again, I am medically diagnosed and do require support to operate as an adult. My childhood was... not good.
I do not want to say it's only upsides, but I do think for some autistic people there are things those people do consider up sides.
Edit: if I could choose to not be autistic, even with the massive burden it has for me, I would choose to remain autistic and I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who tried to change me to remove it.
That's an optimistic take, a more pessimistic one I've had is it seems to me for every trait that an autistic person has that is "good" there's some neurotypical person that has it as well without the suffering.
But it's also not clear what "being you but not autistic" would even mean, since it's an exercise in an imaginary hypothetical.
Mostly access to healthcare, like, "why don't we offer this? Why are there barriers? Why can't we get automatic approvals for this?" Etc.
It turns out there are lots of groups who have greater than median barriers to access even basic care (trans folks, Black folks, immigrants, neurodiverse folks, disabled folks, etc). I happen to have a "I'll just keep calling and escalating until I've called every person in the company" attitude that doesn't seem to find that exhausting.
Interesting. I’m working on a similar project/idea (?app, I don’t know what to call it, doesn’t matter), about helping patients understand what they need to do for primary prevention. I hadn’t thought of the specific barriers that each group might face. I’m a doctor and feel that too much is reliant on the doctor remembering to ask (“oh have we checked your blood sugars btw!”) I want to empower patients with this info.
That's... complicated. There are multiple opinions about aborting fetuses that test positive for Down's syndrome. For one, the tests aren't always accurate. For two, people with Down's syndrome can live fulfilling lives, and have spoken out against the practice. But also it does place an additional burden on parents, and parenting well is already a hard job.
But I don't think it's a reasonable comparison -- autism has a much wider variability in how it expresses, from relatively benign (but still impactful) to fully incapable of self sufficiency.
I'd also argue just because we practice eugenics in case makes it ok to generalize to other cases (and furthermore, just because we practice it doesn't necessarily make it ok even in that case).
People abort babies for reasons far less than "lifelong disability requiring constant care". I'm not saying it's done lightly but surely that kind of issue is as valid a reason as any.
If its not genetic, which autism isn't, then it has nothing to do with eugenics. People have the right to choose how they raise children, trying to dictate that is much more similar to eugenics imo
Your claim that ASD is not genetic is extraordinary and counter to the prevailing scientific understanding, and requires significant evidence to back up.
As an autistic (yes, medically diagnosed, with obviously difficulties in communication and self care) who has survived to adulthood and is able to care for themselves with support now: fuck you for this "real autism" bullshit.
Yes, some people are hit real fucking hard, some of us improve into adulthood, some of us don't get hit that hard in childhood but suffer more as adults.
You don't get to decide what real autism is, especially as an outsider, and excluding people who have that diagnosis is shitty, petty behavior. Grow the fuck up.
Why is "I dress partially in traditional clothing, which management ok'd" an issue? Would you object to someone wearing a cross necklace, turban, yarmulka, niqab, kilt, durag, hijab, kente kufi hat, or other traditional garment at work? Why does a keffiyeh stand out to you?
did i say something stands out for me? show me where?
I'm talking about the argument of taking political or other stands in workplace that others in that same workplace might not feel comfortable with but cant go to another "direction" or ignore.
don't put words in my mouth that i did not say. feels pretty low level discussion when people do that.
The article says that someone was fired for wearing a keffiyeh. Your response is people shouldn't mix personal and work.
Your response is directly to an article saying a keffiyeh got someone fired, so it's absolutely reasonable to assume you are responding to the article and consider it an example of mixing personal and work.
Lisp is cool, but also not everyone reasons in the way lisp operates. For some, lisp extremely "ain't it".
I've never seen lisp in production, but if I had I'm sure I'd be like, ok, we use lisp here.
Lisp is just a tool, and some people with find it ergonomic and powerful, and others will find it awkward and cumbersome. Use the tools that make you happy and productive and don't worry too much about trying to find the best in an ambiguous space.
Without knowing what (if anything!) they don't find awkward and cumbersome, that is not very useful.
Data is very biased in this space, because the Lisp family receives a lot of drive by visits from language nomads. A good chunk of those people find programming awkward and cumbersome. They are having a hard time, and blame the tools.
Lisp is not going to fix someone who can't learn C++ or Java (or whatever) to save their life, but blogging about their disappointing experience will generate flak for Lisp.
I'm saying that if you don't find it easy to edit Lisp, you can't be "normal". You must have dyslexia, ADHD or whatever. Show me how well you can work with C, Rust, Makefiles, Shell scripts, CSS, JavaScript, Kotlin, assembly language, and whatever else before I believe that you're having a problem with Lisp and nothing else.
Lisp is not a refuge for those who can't hack it. I can see how some people might make that false interpretation, by a false association of tenuously related ideas. A language or language family that is under-used is not automatically something that is suitable for or used by the inept or the misfits. Programming language fringe and cognitive fringe are totally different categories.
Lisp is more like an idea (or set of ideas) rather than a concrete tool for specific tasks, and it's an absolutely wonderful, eye-opening idea. Unfortunately, as often happens, good ideas groundlessly get ignored. Concepts like formal methods, reactive programming, and immutable data structures also largely go unnoticed, despite being immensely useful for certain types of problems. Unlike those, the basic ideas behind Lisp are far simpler to grasp and probably have far more tangible benefits. The only practical inherent drawback of spending time learning and practicing Lisp today that I can think of is the limited job opportunities. Beyond that, there are only benefits. The common pushback against Lisp usually comes from misunderstanding it. Many programmers often get tired of using the same language after learning it cover to cover, as every language has certain cons and deficiencies. In my experience, with Lisp, it's the opposite. Having been part of multiple teams and guided many programmers on their Lisp journey, I've seen it many times - if someone doesn't like a Lisp dialect (e.g., Clojure) after using it for a day or two, they tend to start liking it more later. However, some people lack patience and quit without ever seeing what actually makes it so cool, deciding that Lisp is just a fad, awkward, and cumbersome. And that's really sad because, really, it is not. Just because someone dislikes, e.g., math, it doesn't become a fad.
I'm not trying to get people to like it; I'm trying to dispel the myths people believe. Just because I don't like running and exercise, it doesn't mean I should tell everyone there's something wrong with that. I've seen too often comments like: "Lisp is archaic and outdated," "Lisp is hard to read," "Lisp doesn't have a powerful type system," "Lisp code is not easy to refactor," "Nobody uses Lisp in production," etc. None of this is true.
To be fair some of these are subjective. People of course should never sell their opinions as objective or facts. Which btw, I don't think the person you responded to did.
Okay, let's try to go through each of them more or less objectively, shall we?
- "Lisp is archaic and outdated"
While Lisp was introduced in the late 1950s, it has evolved considerably. Modern dialects like Common Lisp and Clojure offer extensive libraries and features that compete with contemporary languages. New Lisp dialects are constantly being added to the family. Clojure-Dart and Jank are more recent examples.
- "Lisp is hard to read"
Lisp’s syntax, based on simple and consistent S-expressions, can be highly readable once you familiarize yourself with it. The concise and uniform structure allows for straightforward parsing and manipulation of code. Try taking any JSON and convert it to EDN, or any HTML/JSX to Hiccup, and visually compare it - the latter would look far more readable. One doesn't even need to know any Clojure at all, to see that this is true.
- "Lisp doesn't have a powerful type system"
While Lisp is generally dynamically typed, Common Lisp supports powerful optional type declarations and checks. Dialects like Typed Racket offer strong, static typing. There's a new extension for CL called Coalton, and Clojure has Spec and Malli. You can do mind-blowingly awesome things with them, e.g., building a data structure for a ledger where each transaction is ensured to be in the correct order and shape — something that would require significantly higher effort to build in any other programming language.
- "Lisp code is not easy to refactor"
The homoiconic nature of Lisp, where code and data share the same structure, makes it particularly amenable to metaprogramming and automated refactoring. Tools like SLIME for CL and Cursive for Clojure can do an amazingly good job helping you refactor.
- "Nobody uses Lisp in production"
While not as mainstream as some other languages, Lisp is actively used in various domains. Companies like Grammarly use Common Lisp, and Clojure is widely adopted in the industry, particularly for data processing and back-end services. Apple built their payment system, Walmart their billing, and Cisco their entire cybersecurity platform. There are tons of examples like that.
There are many seemingly great ideas in our industry that initially received hype but later faced significant criticism — goto statements, the waterfall model, object-oriented databases, CORBA, SOAP, XML everywhere, and so on. Lisp, though, despite all the skepticism, keeps coming back again and again, and just refuses to die.
So, I stand by my words: Lisp (as an idea) is really awesome. Every programmer should gain at least some basic understanding of what it offers, because there's no harm in it — only benefits. Again, I'm not fighting anyone disliking any concrete tool, but hating the idea? Why? The only explanation I have for that - shallow understanding of what that idea is about.
You invented all those quotes and then argued against them. I said none of them. It's probably not your intent but it feels like you are coming after me angrily with these long text responses.
I'm not coming "after you." I'm sorry if you feel attacked, and I apologize if you think I'm angry. We're in a public forum, and I'm simply expressing my opinions (for everyone to see and read). They are not specifically aimed at you or in response to what you've said. This particular comment wasn't even a response to your comment; it just happened to be in the same thread.
I can bike to the office faster than I can drive. Car infrastructure is slow because cars are big and heavy and dangerous.
Door to door, my car trip takes about 20-30 minutes, my bike trip takes 15-20. Not having to deal with parking, stop signs, traffic, etc genuinely does speed things up.
Door-to-door, my car commute is 15-20 minutes. On bicycle it's 40-45 minutes plus time for a shower once I get to work.
Riding a bicycle is more fun though. Something about it triggers daydreaming and I often arrive at work and realize I got there on autopilot. I haven't done it much since the start of COVID, but I recently tuned up my bike, ordered a good floor pump, and plan to resume soon.
Good point! It checks the cardio box for that day.
I don't do it every day though. I only go into the office 3 days a week and for much of the summer it's too hot for me to bike (I'm in Austin, TX). I can manage up until about 101F/38C, but anything after that feels dangerous.
> Not having to deal with parking, stop signs, traffic, etc genuinely does speed things up.
Traffic sure, but you still need a good place to park your bike so it does not get stolen and you should be stopping at stop signs.
I walk basically everywhere and I have to be more vigilant of bicyclists on crosswalks because they always blow through them at full speed regardless of who has the right of way.
In my state, bicyclists can treat stop signs as yields. Yes, that means if there is other traffic it returns to being a stop sign. Yes, there always is right of way for pedestrians.
So no, I definitely shouldn't be stopping at stop signs, but I should be following the rules of the road. Eye contact with peds, sometimes you can quickly negotiate "no, you go ahead". If not, stops for pedestrians.
My work has bike cages, which are right at the entrance and require a badge to access. If not, my bike parks vertically on its own and I could just bring it inside.
Yeah, I (as a biker) also hate dangerous bikers. Especially those weaving onto / off of the sidewalks. The up-side is that the most dangerous bike is 1/100th as damaging as a perfect driver sneezing at the wrong time.
I tend to form stronger empathy and justice models, and commit to them wholly. This has allowed me to, for instance, work on improving access to benefits or healthcare for others while other people around me burn out. But I often fight way too long, and I get upset when people disagree.
I often hyperfocus on projects I'm interested in and can produce a high level of output if given an interesting task.
I enjoy counting, categorization, and organization tasks. Find all bugs that meet these rules, or, double check every unit test to check we're meeting coverage goals. Give me those tedious, repeatable, rules based gardening tasks and I'll churn through them all day every day.
I believe I have a more systemic way of thinking than my peers, and while this does cause problems sometimes it also enables me to decompose systems more easily.
I tend to maintain my cool under pressure or bullying. I simply do not notice nor care about emotionally loaded conversations. This causes problems often but also helps often, I can mediate with "we're here now, let's focus on how to improve".
These, of course, are not the upsides of every autistic person. They are my upsides for me. Again, I am medically diagnosed and do require support to operate as an adult. My childhood was... not good.
I do not want to say it's only upsides, but I do think for some autistic people there are things those people do consider up sides.
Edit: if I could choose to not be autistic, even with the massive burden it has for me, I would choose to remain autistic and I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who tried to change me to remove it.