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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

#111

Post by pjmlp »

kazinator wrote: post #68
amelius wrote: post #47

Can 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.

Knowing Lisp since the days it was the only FP one had access to, I beg to differ.

I really disagree with the 21st century fashion to make everything that isn't a Miranda derived language as not being a FP language.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#112

Post by darkseas »

scrupulusalbion wrote: post #82
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…

FWIW, PicoLisp[0] is one of those lisp dialects that went way out of its way to be syntactically simple/pure/consistent. Whether this is a good idea, I don't know, but it is nevertheless an interesting example of a modern-made lisp that actually considers less data types (i.e. numbers, symbols and lists) to be a virtue. [0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoLisp

I have been interested in taking PicoLisp for a spin, but I've found the friction of installing on OSX a bit much. Do you know of an easier way to use PicoLisp, without re-hacking gcc back into the system?

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#113

Post by vram22 »

diggan wrote: post #76
petra wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Lisps enable a type of development via live coding that I have yet to see a non-Lisp match. How does it compare to using python for live coding?

in lisps, data is code is data. So imagine you can edit your program while it's running, since it's just data. How that compares to python, I'm not sure. But I don't think you can easily modify python code as easily as you can modify lisp programs.

>you can edit your program while it's running, since it's just data.

When I was playing around with Franz Lisp some years ago, I saw this feature, and then soon after, I saw the Edit-and-Go feature in a new MS Visual Studio release. Think I read somewhere that it was ad{a|o}pted from Lisp.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#114

Post by vram22 »

616c wrote: post #46

People who agree with the overall philosophy of this will be interested in avesh, an attempt to write a full shell in CL. https://gitlab.com/ralt/avesh I am also very interested in xonsh. I am increasingly of the opinion that as useful as a package manager would be like {bash,zsh} compliant shells written in host languages that allow you to merge bashisms/Unixisms into your host lang and vice versa. I started looking…

There is/was also scsh, a Scheme shell for Unix.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#115

Post by catnaroek »

jonathankoren wrote: post #99
betenoire wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other kind of syntax is there? But yes, I've seen a lot of procedural code in every paradigm I can think of. Lots of cargo-cult programming results in it.

Sit down dear child and hear of languages long ago... Back I. The days of vacuum tube and electromechanical switches, when punch tape rules the world p, there were two languages: The Algorithmic Language, and the List Processor. The List Process, or LISP, to its friends was built around s-expressions. The other, also known as ALGOL, was built around a strange and unholy hybrid of text and formulae that only an insane…

Have you heard of Prolog? (Just to mention a single language whose syntax doesn't fall in either category you mentioned. Not that there aren't others.)

Also, as someone who studies mathematics for fun, I disagree with your statement that a mathematician would love a system with lots of special cases. If anything, mathematicians are willing to pay a higher abstraction tax than most other people, just to unify special cases.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#116

Post by catnaroek »

betenoire wrote: post #91
catnaroek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so now what determines whether a language is “procedural” is its surface syntax rather than its semantics?

What other kind of syntax is there? But yes, I've seen a lot of procedural code in every paradigm I can think of. Lots of cargo-cult programming results in it.

Not that procedural programming is intrinsically a bad thing. Hierarchically decomposing tasks into simpler ones is a time-honored approach to dealing with complexity because it works. It's not “cargo-cult”.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#117

Post by 616c »

vram22 wrote: post #114
616c wrote: post #46

People who agree with the overall philosophy of this will be interested in avesh, an attempt to write a full shell in CL. https://gitlab.com/ralt/avesh I am also very interested in xonsh. I am increasingly of the opinion that as useful as a package manager would be like {bash,zsh} compliant shells written in host languages that allow you to merge bashisms/Unixisms into your host lang and vice versa. I started looking…

There is/was also scsh, a Scheme shell for Unix.

Well, yes, I am aware of it. I had trouble getting scsh to work well. Outside of Guile, I am not even sure what Scheme implementations are viable. I have played with Chicken and Gambit very minimally.

IIRC, schs uses the MIT48 or a classic Scheme variant specific to it, and I do not know if there is anything "built" on top of that. Where as least other esoteric schemes (Chicken, Gambit, Gauche, etc.) are full environments people can code in, in theory.

Guile is fascinating to me because this concept, subsumed into Emacs (a la the guile->elisp super project), means a very interesting idea that I think moves beyond the IDE. Some people here will poo poo that, but I find it very interesting as I have moved away from tmux and screen and into Emacs as my combined editor AND terminal manager. I know I know, where's the Unix philosophy.

But, I like this. Soon I will play with this stack on top of Guix, and well, that is more Lisp Machine that I should be allowed to have.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#118

Post by dang »

x1024 wrote: post #108
hellofunk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just pointing out the facts. Some of us do clearly know more about this issue than you do, so not sure why you are continuing in this manner.

Because four times now you've said "I know more than you" and have provided nothing of substance to back your claims. I know this is HN and "what you say" means more than "what you do", but hipster bravado will only get you so far.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines.

If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#119

Post by x1024 »

hellofunk wrote: post #109
x1024 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because four times now you've said "I know more than you" and have provided nothing of substance to back your claims. I know this is HN and "what you say" means more than "what you do", but hipster bravado will only get you so far.

Other people in this thread have pointed out the erroneous assumptions in your comment. In this particular example, you are showing your ignorance of the discussion and continuing to respond in a spoiled manner. Please don't contribute to HN this way.

Still no examples, though. It's great how "you're great because you say you're great". Great.

Re: Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language

#120

Post by vram22 »

616c wrote: post #117
vram22 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is/was also scsh, a Scheme shell for Unix.

Well, yes, I am aware of it. I had trouble getting scsh to work well. Outside of Guile, I am not even sure what Scheme implementations are viable. I have played with Chicken and Gambit very minimally. IIRC, schs uses the MIT48 or a classic Scheme variant specific to it, and I do not know if there is anything "built" on top of that. Where as least other esoteric schemes (Chicken, Gambit, Gauche, etc.) are full environ…

Have you considered Racket? I believe its a sort of Scheme (experts, feel free to correct me) and a friend told me it has a small but good community. Also, an IDE, many libraries, etc.
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