11–20 of 46 posts
Javascript. Cheating because it's not a lisp. But it was created by a schemer who originally put scheme in the browser (before he created javascript). Not what I prefer, but it's the most lisp-like language I actually use in real projects. The support for closures, lisp-1 invoking functions from variables, and dynamic typing feel very scheme-like.
For over a decade I wrote mainly in C++ doing a lot of Windows programming, usually games or simulations. Mix in some VB and C# when I didn't want to battle the Win32 API. I was used to seeing codebases with 100k+ loc and hundreds of megabytes of code files. xkcd COMPILING is real!
While working at BitTorrent in 2013, a coworker back introduced me to his little server that distributes uTorrent executable to everybody. It was an implementation of this[1] paper for a general purpose rules-based engine with a snappy (Clojurescript?) front-end. The whole thing was ~5k loc, and ran on surprisingly small hardware compared to it's traffic.
From there I was hooked. My project sizes are radically smaller, it's LISP, and I can go wherever Java goes. I wrote about my experiences with AWS Lambdas last year [2], for example. The community itself is outstanding. They are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. Because the community focuses on small libraries that are composable, those libraries become remarkably stable. Several heavily used libraries haven't had commits in months or years.
[1]: http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/ml05e-maranget.pdf
Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang by Gene Sher makes a compelling argument (with detailed, varied examples) that Erlang is the perfect language with which to implement neural nets.
Lisp has always been associated with AI, of course. Nowadays it's all Python, Java and R for machine learning, but Lisp can do just as well, plus more: Lisp has an affinity for recursion, and its homoiconicity will - I suspect - prove fundamental for true AI. One can't just 'strap on' its features to those other languages (including Elixir: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623991).
So, obviously the right tool for the job is LFE!
I tried a bunch of other lisps but disliked them for various reasons. Clojure is nice because of the tooling, but I disliked being tied to the JVM and all what that means.
CL has some very nice implementations (Allegro CL has a limited free version that has forever changed how I think a programming environment should be).
In the end I found guile scheme which is great. The threading situation is good and getting better, the language has all the comfortable srfi's that implementations like chez lack, and it has nice community.
The reason I chose guile over chicken was the r6rs compatibility, which made supporting both chez and guile rather easy. Other than that, I'd say that the chicken community is probably the nicest one online. Chicken is really a fine scheme as well.
I am not a programmer though, and what I want is for programming to be just fun. Not enterprise ready, not web6.0-cool. just fun.
Shameless self-plug: I just finished my racket-like for l-loops for guile: https://bitbucket.org/bjoli/guile-for-loops
I'm very happy with Guile and its performance has greatly been improved with version 2.2 (not that performance was a problem before); one thing I miss in Guile is the picture language that Racket comes with.
I also spend some time with clojure around the time of v1.0-1.2 and quite liked it, but it's maturity level and the JVM made it less attractive in the long run.
I like scheme as well, but because of the spartan(to use a nice word) spec, If I actually want to get stuff done I'd have to chose just one implementation and it's associated libraries, rather than rely on portable code.
clisp mostly. Easier to use than sbcl, which mostly fails to install.
Javascript. Cheating because it's not a lisp. But it was created by a schemer who originally put scheme in the browser (before he created javascript). Not what I prefer, but it's the most lisp-like language I actually use in real projects. The support for closures, lisp-1 invoking functions from variables, and dynamic typing feel very scheme-like.
I know there is no formal definition, but without homoiconicity provided by s-exps, it is hard to call it a lisp. Of course, it sounds like you're well aware of this. Do you use a lisp for hobby projects.
McCarthy's first Lisp programs were written in MLISP notation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there is no formal definition, but without homoiconicity provided by s-exps, it is hard to call it a lisp. Of course, it sounds like you're well aware of this. Do you use a lisp for hobby projects.
There are a bunch of Lisp dialects without s-expression syntax. McCarthy's first Lisp programs were written in MLISP notation.