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Lisp is still a secret weapon

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Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#61

Post by discreteevent »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

" I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for applications where the speed of the compiled code is important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of students) when the main goal is communication, not programming per se. In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice."

- Peter Norvig

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#62

Post by antod »

bbcbasic wrote: post #12

Lisp? Meh! The real secret is Agda. The real real secret is using a language so obscure that you end up writing the compiler for production use, by studying the compiler that some researcher created for a paper.

Does that mean BBC Basic is no longer your preferred secret weapon?

Or was your post just a diversionary tactic to protect your competitive advantage?

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Scarbutt wrote: post #36
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I wonder if Graham was presented with the same problem today, will he pick a lisp and write everything from scratch or pick up a less "expressive" language because it has a strong and mature ecosystem of libs.

[deleted]

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#64

Post by jlarocco »

I can't believe an article about Lisp left out QuickLisp. It's the most popular Common Lisp package manager and has over 1200 open source libraries in it, and most of them are written in Common Lisp, or are bindings to native C/C++ libraries. Using libraries written in the same language you're using has a lot of advantages. Using Java libraries from a Lisp seems clunky.

Also, judging solely by the number of available packages is not a good measurement. Browse through NPM, and it's pretty obvious there are a LOT of duplicates, and that people have published libraries for the silliest little things. Search for "PNG", for example, and in the first page of results there are two different png diff libraries, a few libraries for determining if a buffer contains a PNG byte-stream, multiple stream and un-stream libraries, etc. That's all done with a single library in CL.

And finally, I don't think Clojure is that great. It's better than Java, and it's what I'd use if I had a lot of legacy Java code to work with, but it wouldn't be my first choice for a new project written in Lisp. I would hazard a guess that it's popular because it's less clunky than Java, without the over the top type system of Scala.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#65

Post by hardwaresofton »

This seems like a little bit (probably a lot) of hyperbole around clojure.

While I love clojure, selling it as a "secret sauce" you just sprinkle on your startup and it succeeds is definitely not the message I think the community should be trying to send.

Lisps have benefits, they're pretty well documented (just the fact that lisp is multi-paradigm in and of itself is a large benefit), but they're not infallible. If you give macros to the wrong programmer, you will slow your entire team down.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#66

Post by gnaritas »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #35
agumonkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes hand in hand. Back in the days people said lisp in newbies hands will be backfire, but handled by those with abstraction skills it will give you ability to express things you cannot with other systems. Many here agree that technology should not matter, but it does at one point. Some trait of the culture behind and around languages are very very important. Lisp tree recursion, "lexicality" and ad-hoc genericit…

I'm not really a programmer. All my training is in abstract math so whenever I see people arguing over language X and Y it always seems weird to me. I don't write code until I've sketched things out with pencil and paper and by necessity I have to disentagle the syntax of the language from the essence of the problem. Turns out when I do things that way translating the solution back into a language X ends up being the…

> and by necessity I have to disentangle the syntax of the language from the essence of the problem.

Doing that is why programmers prefer different languages, some language allow that to be easier than others do. Some language allow a much more direct expression of the essence of the problem.

> Adding macros and types just shifts how I encode the solution and in no way affects its abstract formulation.

Sure it does, it allows you express the abstract formulation more directly with less syntactic fluff. Ideally you wind up with a DSL that allows the problem to be solved as tersely yet readably as possible.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#67

Post by bad_user »

amelius wrote: post #24

I tried Clojure, but immediately got the impression that the run-time type-system is ill-designed. I cannot recall the details, but I can remember odd things like different run-time types used for empty lists than for non-empty lists. A simple program doing a "switch" on some run-time types turned out to be really cluttered. But of course, there's always the possibility that I was doing something wrong :)

In a dynamic language you're not supposed to rely on types, but on (dynamic) interfaces. Also Clojure, as a design choice, converts your collection into a lazy list when applying operators, then you need to convert it back if you want by using "into".

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#68

Post by bbcbasic »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #55
bbcbasic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your startup is dependent on solving chicken and egg marketing problems the choice of Lisp vs. something else is fairly irrelevant as you said. This is the case in most startups that take a traditional business (e.g. Taxi) and modernise it (e.g. uber). The level of tech required to do that is not going to be cutting edge. It is quite rote to solve these things in RoR or PHP. On the other hand there may be some sta…

I think you're making the case for language irrelevance even more. The reason big corp. can't move fast isn't because of their technology choices. It is because of all the bloatware and bureaucracy. You can be bureaucratic and bloated in any language.

Yes because the causation goes the other way.

The kind of org that cares about how it writes software will choose the right tool for the job, which may be Lisp. However they may be able to achieve their aims in Java. Whatever they choose it would have been carefully considered.

The kind of org that doesn't care how it writes software is unlikely to choose an outlier language and will use C#, PHP, Java etc. because it is easier to hire devs and you won't get fired for choosing it.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#69

Post by bbcbasic »

antod wrote: post #62
bbcbasic wrote: post #12

Lisp? Meh! The real secret is Agda. The real real secret is using a language so obscure that you end up writing the compiler for production use, by studying the compiler that some researcher created for a paper.

Does that mean BBC Basic is no longer your preferred secret weapon? Or was your post just a diversionary tactic to protect your competitive advantage?

I am waiting for the cycle to repeat and basic to be cool again. I give it just 30 years.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#70

Post by bbcbasic »

backlava wrote: post #56
dkarapetyan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're making the case for language irrelevance even more. The reason big corp. can't move fast isn't because of their technology choices. It is because of all the bloatware and bureaucracy. You can be bureaucratic and bloated in any language.

But in some languages bloat is a best practice.

It's all about how many adjectives you can get into your class name. e.g.

   SingletonFactoryAdaptorFacadeProviderEnumerator myClass;
With Haskell it is about how big your monad stack is

    StateT ReaderT WriterT LensifierT MaybeT BeerT (IO Int).
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