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Lisp is still a secret weapon

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Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#101

Post by mycelium »

incepted wrote: post #93
Guthur wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does being dynamically typed seal it's fate? Dynamic typing does not seem to be on the way out at all, cases in point; Javascript (everywhere), Python, Ruby to name the big ones.

Javascript will probably be around for a while but Python and Ruby have been constantly shrinking in mind share and buzz these past years (mostly because of Go but also because there are now faster, statically typed languages that subsume them). The simple truth is that statically typed languages have been much better at improving in areas where dynamically typed languages used to be the only ones shining than the ot…

> Javascript will probably be around for a while but Python and Ruby have been constantly shrinking in mind share and buzz these past years

At least in the scientific and data analysis communities, Python is exploding. I'd say it's neck and neck with R. R's infrastructure outside data analysis is weak but improving. Go isn't even a part of the conversation.

Can't speak to Ruby, but as the "big data" hype cycle continues Python will continue to blow up.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#102

Post by mycelium »

cheez wrote: post #49
jtwebman wrote: post #19

He didn't sell me on why Lisp is better than any other language? Why would you pick Lisp or Clojure over say Elixir, Scala, or even F#? JT

It's like Python, but you can transform the structure of your program with the language itself.

https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#103

Post by pjmlp »

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…

I have a good CS background and follow a similar approach.

We were lucky that back they excel in throwing all the paradigms at the students and have enough lectures about pure algorithms and data structures regardless of the language.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#104

Post by nnq »

If you're asking yourself what kinds of problems is a Lisp good for you should probably watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g (A computational chemist built himself his own Common Lisp implementation because no other language available was powerful enough for his needs...)

It basically boils to: if you're solving a truly new and interesting problems for which the current libraries and ecosystems don't matter that much to you anyhow (because what you do is too bleeding-edge / ahead of everyone else, so you'll write your own better stuff anyhow), than you might want to choose a Lisp.

And if your problem is so bleeding-edge and exotic that you also need to build your own programming-language for it, than you might just as well build yourself a Lisp (like the guy in the video did) and add your needed features to it, because this would be easier than any other approaches and allow you to spend more time on your problem and not on the language...

EDIT+: another example is DWave using SBCL: http://www.dwavesys.com/careers/senior-software-developer - if quantum (or analog... anyway...) computing is not "truly new and cutting edge", than I don't know what is

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#105

Post by pjmlp »

agentultra wrote: post #88

> Clojure hit the scene as a modern lisp that embraced the JVM. > By now, Clojure is the de facto standard lisp for new applications. What's with the whole, "modern," meme when people talk about Clojure? SBCL only forked off from CMU CL in 1999. Clozure CL is still well supported and actively developed. It's not like CL was written in the 1960s and had never changed ever since. The final standard was published in 199…

One issue is that open source CL lacks the tooling from commercial Lisps, and there are not many of them available.

Yes there is a standard, but is like having to keep coding in K&R C, in terms of actual needs.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#106

Post by [deleted] »

Goladus wrote: post #81
dkarapetyan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm not really a programmer. The real question is do you understand how a computer works. There's mapping a solution into a programming language, but programming language is just a tool to help with the real goal which is to map the solution to the computer itself. > The fundamental bottleneck is always what's in your head. Expressing a correct solution in a programming language is just the first step. It also has…

[deleted]

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#107

Post by Scarbutt »

jwr wrote: post #96
Guthur wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too would love to know the basis of the "Modern Lisp" meme. There is very little in Clojure that has not been done before.

As a long time Common Lisper, allow me to disagree. The STM and concurrency features of Clojure are what brought me in, and they certainly haven't been "done before". Common Lisp's concurrency story was always poor. You could also argue that the effects of lazy evalutation and transducers could have been achieved before using SERIES package, but then you surely haven't tried to actually use and debug SERIES code.

and yet I have never seen STM being used in the clojure community, show me a project that really leverages Clojure's STM, they aren't any.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#108

Post by e12e »

Adlai wrote: post #80
sjatkins wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heretical or not you are dead wrong. Don't think so? Go program in Forth or Assembler instead of your current main language for a while and get back to me. There would have been no reason to invent any HLL or even assembler if you were correct. Put aside your ruby and try to do the same work in vanilla C and get back to me.

Forth is as high-level as you'd like it to be. http://www.colorforth.com/POL.htm

Indeed, a strange one to pick. I'd even say that if portability isn't a concern, working with x86_64 assembly is quite pleasant. If you avoid the lure of premature optimization, and stick with either function oriented, or at least procedure oriented programming, without too many long jumps -- I think you could get on quite fine in assembly.

The biggest issue, might be one that (sadly too) many low-level languages share: with the move to UTF-8 as the only sane choice for text, there are no string/char datatypes any more. No reason one can't use procedures/functions to deal with strings in assembly, but it would require a bit more planning than in a language that have "native" UTF-8 support.

[ed: I think Kollibri OS proves both points: it's a working OS, but they've yet to port from 32bit to 64bit even though they upstream they forked from (Menuet OS) has a 64 bit version (that's not Free software/open source).

http://kolibrios.org/en/

Another "big" asm OS project is: https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/Pure64 ]

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#109

Post by e12e »

nate_martin wrote: post #16

Are there any examples of companies that achieved success by way of language choice other than Viaweb?

I always thought dabbledb[1] was a good example of choosing Smalltalk. Sadly the product died, after the team moved to Twitter.

Still not sure why they didn't just open up the source.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#110

Post by bulte-rs »

bbcbasic wrote: post #70
backlava wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So this is why the golang community prefers:

    for c := range(ns) {
        // some blah
    }
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