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Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

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Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#31

Post by LukeB_UK »

plugnburn wrote: post #30
LukeB_UK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk: https://www.fourmilab.ch/ There are lots of good articles on there, but the site uses frames. Does that detract from the quality of the content? No. Paul Graham's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/ Has a HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and uses tables for layouts. Does that detract from the content? No. Hell, you're on hacker news. It doesn't even define a docty…

You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me. No one is an authority for me. > This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk If he's a cofounder of Autodesk and can't make a decent website himself, how hard would it be to pay someone who can? > Paul Graham's site Even worse than the former. Someone, stop that pain, tell him finally how to adjust screen resolution over…

> You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me. No one is an authority for me.

You're mistaken, I'm actually using these people as examples of their technical ability. People may have a website, but not be web devs. Judging people and the contents of their site on the way their site looks is just wrong.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#32

Post by agumonkey »

plugnburn wrote: post #22
agumonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope he doesn't look at HN HTML code.

Looked. So what? There's a difference between "ugly" and "invalid". Both cases are bad but the first one has much more impact on end users. Edit to answer "how is it invalid": is this not enough? http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

How is it invalid ?

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#33

Post by plugnburn »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #13
shrugger wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deleted b/c brigading

Consider if I was an expert in databases. Why would the appearance of a site dedicated to databases matter? It'd be completely unrelated to the topic I'd be sharing information on, and time I could spend improving the site could be time I spend improving my knowledge even further. As for this Lisp scripting site, for all I care the author could've shared the information via a Pastebin site and I would've got the same…

Except that most pastebins would at least make the text more readable than it is there. Especially on mobiles.

Markdown with Strapdown inclusion, a pastebin, a CMS, bare Bootstrap... anything would be more readable than this.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#34

Post by devishard »

plugnburn wrote: post #30
LukeB_UK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk: https://www.fourmilab.ch/ There are lots of good articles on there, but the site uses frames. Does that detract from the quality of the content? No. Paul Graham's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/ Has a HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and uses tables for layouts. Does that detract from the content? No. Hell, you're on hacker news. It doesn't even define a docty…

You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me. No one is an authority for me. > This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk If he's a cofounder of Autodesk and can't make a decent website himself, how hard would it be to pay someone who can? > Paul Graham's site Even worse than the former. Someone, stop that pain, tell him finally how to adjust screen resolution over…

> You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me. No one is an authority for me.

That attitude is a pretty good way to ensure you learn nothing from anyone. I hope for your sake you grow out of it!

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#35

Post by hga »

mbrock wrote: post #23
sdegutis wrote: post #17

Back in 2012 when I was sure I wanted to master some dialect of Lisp but wasn't sure which one yet, I read about 80% of Practical Common Lisp before I noped the heck out of there. The whole reason I was drawn to Lisp was for its semantic and syntactic purity, simplicity, and consistency, and out of the three popular Lisps at the time, CL felt like it had these the least. Ultimately I ended up going with Clojure after…

I don't think purity and simplicity are virtues of Common Lisp. It's more of a pragmatic, industrial, old language, meant to unify the competing dialects back in the 1980s.

Old as in so old, its goes directly back to the first LISP, which was implemented as FORTRAN subroutines which ran on a vacuum tube computer, the IBM 704, which was, at least, advanced enough to use magnetic core memory.

Scheme rethought a number of things with the experience of a couple of decades in developing languages, and Common Lisp included one of its breaking changes, lexical scope (I think Gnu Emacs Lisp and AutoCad's AutoLISP are the only widely used dialects with dynamic scope, and they're obviously not primarily language implementations).

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#36

Post by duncanawoods »

sdegutis wrote: post #17

Back in 2012 when I was sure I wanted to master some dialect of Lisp but wasn't sure which one yet, I read about 80% of Practical Common Lisp before I noped the heck out of there. The whole reason I was drawn to Lisp was for its semantic and syntactic purity, simplicity, and consistency, and out of the three popular Lisps at the time, CL felt like it had these the least. Ultimately I ended up going with Clojure after…

I have tried lisps looking for the famed syntactic purity but I didn't really find it.

For example, following the little schemer books, they don't print scheme as the actual ascii you need to type, instead they use typography like bold, italic and greek symbols that you have to replace with the uglier reality to distinguish between things like s-expr from lists. It feels like they are embarrassed by the cludgy real syntax, so they hide it and push the difficulty on to the reader.

To give clojure a whirl, I was prepared for lispy paren extravagance but when translating a small program to my best guess at idiomatic clojure (I'm sure I failed) there were so many non-s-expr syntactic special cases for things like list comprehensions and common macros that the result felt like it was jealous of non-s-expr languages and didn't actually want to be a lisp.

In truth, I believe a strong contrast between different syntactic elements helps readability, so I don't think the s-expr regularity I expected is something I actually want.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#37

Post by coldtea »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #27
cisstrd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then surely, so is this http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

They made it washed out with poor contrast and made the lines annoyingly short. Seems like the first site is more readable to me.

Everything we know from centuries of design experience and all science knows about the eyes and how we read, tells us they made it better than the first site.

There's not even a parallel universe where the first one is better -- and it's not a subjective issue either.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#38

Post by [deleted] »

plugnburn wrote: post #20
itsunbelievable wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sickening-grade bikeshedding. Next time, spare us, and say it to your rubber duck instead.

Did you just register to say that? Hilarious. I'd always laughed at "developers" that can't even arrange their own websites properly and still try to educate us about what's acceptable and what is not. Don't know a thing about web design? Use a ready-made blogging platform then, not a school-grade HTML4 style-less nonsense. No one forces you to roll your own solution every single time. But heck, even a simple Bootstr…

[deleted]

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#39

Post by coldtea »

plugnburn wrote: post #30
LukeB_UK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk: https://www.fourmilab.ch/ There are lots of good articles on there, but the site uses frames. Does that detract from the quality of the content? No. Paul Graham's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/ Has a HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and uses tables for layouts. Does that detract from the content? No. Hell, you're on hacker news. It doesn't even define a docty…

You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me. No one is an authority for me. > This is the website of John Walker, cofounder of Autodesk If he's a cofounder of Autodesk and can't make a decent website himself, how hard would it be to pay someone who can? > Paul Graham's site Even worse than the former. Someone, stop that pain, tell him finally how to adjust screen resolution over…

>You are obviously trying to do some appeal to authority, which doesn't work on me.

No, he is obviously giving counter-examples of content in poor markup, and how that doesn't stop it from being great content.

Whoooosh...

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#40

Post by dwc »

sdegutis wrote: post #17

Back in 2012 when I was sure I wanted to master some dialect of Lisp but wasn't sure which one yet, I read about 80% of Practical Common Lisp before I noped the heck out of there. The whole reason I was drawn to Lisp was for its semantic and syntactic purity, simplicity, and consistency, and out of the three popular Lisps at the time, CL felt like it had these the least. Ultimately I ended up going with Clojure after…

I sympathize. Different concerns pull lisp in different directions.

CL is, and always has been, about getting stuff done and isn't above having some warts, especially historical warts.

Scheme was more academic and elegant, but not great for real world use until some implementations "fixed" that. Racket, for instance, isn't quite a proper Scheme any longer, but is definitely practical.

Clojure looks interesting, but I have absolutely no need or desire to use a JVM-based language.

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