Which leads to the other old saying, "computers do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do".

As long as you don't let it turn around and let the computer dictate how you think.

I think it was Dijkstra that complained in one of his essays about naming uni departments "Computer Science" rather than "Comput_ing_ Science". He said it's a symptom of a dangerous slope where we build our work as programmers around specific computer features or even specific computers instead of using them as tools that can enable our mind to ask and verify more and more interesting questions.

the “playing with legos” mental model

??

Read that knowing nothing of lisp before and nothing clicked tbh.

When talking about tools that simplify writing boilerplate, it only makes sense to me to call them code generatiors if they generate code for another language. Within a single language a tool that simplifies complex tasks is just a library or could be implemented as a library. I don't see the point with programmers not utilizing 'code generation' due to it requiring external tools. They say that if such tools existed in the language natively:

we could save tremendous amounts of time by creating simple bits of code that do mundane code generation for us!

If code is to be reused you can just put it in a function, and doing that doesn't take more effort than putting it in a code generation thingy. They preach how the xml script (and lisp I guess) lets you introduce new operators and change the syntax tree to make things easier, but don't acknowledge that functions, operator overriding etc accomplish the same thing only with different syntax, then go on to say this:

We can add packages, classes, methods, but we cannot extend Java to make addition of new operators possible. Yet we can do it to our heart's content in XML - its syntax tree isn't restricted by anything except our interpreter!

What difference does it make that the syntax tree changes depending on your code vs the call stack changes depending on your code? Of course if you define an operator (apparently also called a function in lisp) somewhere else it'll look better than doing each step one by one in the java example. Treating functions as keywords feels like a completely arbitrary decision. Honestly they could claim lisp has no keywords/operators and it would be more believable. If there is to be a syntax tree, the parenthesis seem to be a better choice for what changes it than the functions that just determine what happens at each step like any other function. And even going by their definition, I like having a syntax that does a limited number of things in a more visually distinct way more than a syntax does limitless things all in the same monotonous way.

Lisp comes with a very compact set of built in functions - the necessary minimum. The rest of the language is implemented as a standard library in Lisp itself.

Isn't that how every programming language works? It feels unfair to raise this as an advantage against a markup language.

Data being code and code being data sounded like it was leading to something interesting until it was revealed that functions are a seperate type and that you need to mark non-function lists with an operator for them to not get interpreted as functions. Apart from the visual similarity in how it's written due to the syntax limitations of the language, data doesn't seem any more code in lisp than evaluating strings in python. If the data is valid code it'll work, otherwise it won't.

The only compelling part was where the same compiler for the code is used to parse incoming data and perform operations on it, but even that doesn't feel like a game changer unless you're forbidden from using libraries for parsing.

Finally I'm not sure how the article relates to code being math neither. It just felt like inventing new words to call existing things and insisting that they're different. Or maybe I just didn't get it at all. Sorry if this was uncalled for. It's just that I had expected more after being promised enlightenment by the article

There's a wide variety of types of programming. It's nice that the core concepts can carry across between the disparate branches.

If I'm doing a particular custom view I'll end up using sin cos tan for some basic trig but that's about as complex as any mobile CRUD app gets.

I'm sure there are some math heavy mobile apps but they're the exception that proves the rule.