Now that scripting languages are almost dead?
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index
4/10 top languages are scripting languages. Not bad for something that's almost dead.
Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
61–70 of 138 posts
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#62Can anybody explain the advantages of switching to a functional language when it is not a pure one? For example, how is it better than Javascript? Is the uniformity of the syntax (and perhaps implicit currying) the main benefit?
This may not be the answer you're looking for, but I think you might get the highest ratio of information-to-time by just trying it out. Second-hand opinions are hard. Practical Common Lisp is the best intro, and two chapters (maybe 40 min) in you'll know if it's worth going further.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#63If an HN post with 10 upvotes makes your site go down, do you really have the right to tell people how to write code?
If you don't know the most common causes of a site going down, do you really have the right to ask people if they really have the right to tell people how to write code?
No to mention they're not actually telling people how to write code.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And this happens regularly! I know of experts in programming languages[0], compression[1], graphics[2, 3], and computational geometry[3] who all have sites that both have excellent content, and look fairly awful. [0]: http://piumarta.com/index.html [1]: http://cbloom.com/ [2]: http://iquilezles.org/ (okay, this one doesn't look that bad in retrospect) [3]: http://paulbourke.net/
[0] and [3] look great, unless you are opposed to simplicity. They kind of follow "brutalism" in a web architecture.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#65Lisp is an acceptable language for a variety of things, not just "scripting". I work on many projects written in Guile Scheme that range from game engines to static site generators to dynamic web applications to package managers, and I write one-off scripting tasks with it, too. There's a lot of mystique around Lisp and Scheme, and people tend to write it off as a relic of academia, but I use it for practical needs every day. Lisps enable a type of development via live coding that I have yet to see a non-Lisp match. I've used the REPL for doing everyday calculator tasks to live coding video games, and I've used it for customizing an X11 window manager in the past, too.
But rather than read about me confess my love for Lisp, I recommend that people just pick a Lisp that looks fun and take it for a spin. You might find a lot to like.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#66Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#67Well, you can use LISP/Scheme as a procedural language with a little "code obfuscation" ... (define (return x) x) (define (! a b c) (not (b a c))) (define (-- a) (- a 1)) (define (cout junk thing) (display thing)) (define
Wait, so now what determines whether a language is “procedural” is its surface syntax rather than its semantics?
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#68Can anybody explain the advantages of switching to a functional language when it is not a pure one? For example, how is it better than Javascript? Is the uniformity of the syntax (and perhaps implicit currying) the main benefit?
Lisp isn't a functional language. It's a family of languages, most of which support more than one programming paradigm.
Most languages that are identified as some kind of Lisp are strictly evaluated, do not support partial evaluation (explicit currying only), and support mutable variables and mutable aggregate objects.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#69Well, you can use LISP/Scheme as a procedural language with a little "code obfuscation" ... (define (return x) x) (define (! a b c) (not (b a c))) (define (-- a) (- a 1)) (define (cout junk thing) (display thing)) (define
Wait, so now what determines whether a language is “procedural” is its surface syntax rather than its semantics?
Just take a little joke mate. It's fun.
Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
#70Back 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…
>semantic and syntactic purity, simplicity, and consistency
Who wants simplicity? People learning the language, so they have less to learn and a lower cognitive overhead when starting out. People teaching the language, so they have less work. Language implementors, so they have a much shorter period of time between prototype and release of a language implementation.
Who doesn't want simplicity? People who've already learnt the language and are proficient with it and use it regularly, having grown accustomed to the features it provides that can't be properly added afterwards as macros or libraries.