Did Kenny ever release his educational software?
It appears so, yes: http://tiltonsalgebra.com/#
Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
81–90 of 160 posts
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like niche stuff. What language doesn't result in unmaintainable code, really? And let me just say... it's a bit rude to spread this rumor that Lisp is anti-social and bad for business when you've barely even tried it. Seriously. "Prove me wrong" is not a good way to discuss. See for yourself instead: learn Lisp and try to use it to write maintainable code.
I think you touch an interesting area. For me, figuring out how to make code maintainable (including error handling) is still an area of research, and I'm not a newbie. At least Lisp, with its metaprogramming facilities, gives you some good tools for experimenting. And I do think that the experimental character of the original problem space when Lisp was discovered plays an important role there.
Agreed. I think creating maintainable code is for various reasons very difficult, and I have barely seen any projects that succeed, especially not commercial software.
Based on my experience, I could say that unmaintainable software results from using Java, JavaScript, Ruby, shell, and so on... but I don't like to blame the languages.
Instead, I think it's simply that no language by itself can enforce properties that lead to maintainable software. For example, Java is very clean and simple, but that doesn't mean that typical Java code bases are clean or simple.
Programmers will eventually always find a way to introduce strange complexity, inappropriate metaphors, incomprehensible abstractions, befuddling reuse, overly clever tricks, etc.
If we really want to learn to make maintainable software, we should probably stop focusing on language features (and boring language wars) and think more about stuff like Eric Evans's concept of ubiquitous language... and, yeah, experiment with ways of writing clear code in whatever languages we use.
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you pay for it? http://www.lispworks.com/products/capi.html
I did buy frameworks for work, and this does look OK, but coding gui by hand is not something our developers can handle in large scales.
It seems that there is an interface builder.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lcl50/clwug/clw-216.h...
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#84I'm of the opinion that there is only one lisp right now with some serious potential to dominate in the future, and that is Racket. Why? For one very simple reason: unlike all other lisps, there is serious, ongoing, and lengthy research into correctly bringing a static type-checking process to the language. Clojure's core.typed doesn't count here, as it is full of significant holes that invalidate its entire point --…
Isn't HN on Arc?
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#85I'm of the opinion that there is only one lisp right now with some serious potential to dominate in the future, and that is Racket. Why? For one very simple reason: unlike all other lisps, there is serious, ongoing, and lengthy research into correctly bringing a static type-checking process to the language. Clojure's core.typed doesn't count here, as it is full of significant holes that invalidate its entire point --…
What makes the Racket model more correct than the system based in Sequent Calculus [1] provided by Shen?
[1] - http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/types/types_sequent_c...
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is what you might code, which I humbly submit to you is very readable: It's not, if that's a real life example. There is no context for what the data is, like a variable names.
Valid point. In that example it's using a list to hold each bar because I was focusing on the iteration and the raw data came from a yahoo api utility. You could use a struct or a class which would give you accessor functions, and would be better for a real program. You setup a struct: (defstruct bar date open high low close vol) And this would be a one-time conversion of the data: (mapcar (lambda (b) (apply 'make-ba…
Another trick is to define the struct like (defstruct (foo :type list) ....) and then you can use the struct accessors on any list of the appropriate size. (Or, if you want constant time element access, specify the type as vector)
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You confuse powerful with popular. Many startups don't need powerful tools, other than a CRUD framework and JQuery. Also, existence and abundance of libraries is a factor, and Lisp didn't get much love from the OSS web folks til recently.
Well, no, I'm not confusing powerful and popular. I'm asking why, for all lisp's power, there's almost no examples of that power actually doing anyone any good. Is it because most projects don't need something powerful? The benefits of that power aren't actually that great compared to the rest of the lisp baggage? We have this trope of the smug lisp weenie and there's definitely a whiff of high wizardry around lisp,…
Well for a long time the only proper Lisp environments were commercial.
Still people get by with Emacs + SLIME + whatever open source version, as making use of those environments.
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#88I'm of the opinion that there is only one lisp right now with some serious potential to dominate in the future, and that is Racket. Why? For one very simple reason: unlike all other lisps, there is serious, ongoing, and lengthy research into correctly bringing a static type-checking process to the language. Clojure's core.typed doesn't count here, as it is full of significant holes that invalidate its entire point --…
Isn't HN on Arc?
Arc runs on mzscheme which turned into Racket. The last official release of Arc requires an older release of mzscheme from before lists were immutable. There is a community-maintained fork called Anarki [1] that runs on modern Racket.
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haskel programmers: you can spot them by that constant pained look, as if they have to step in horse poop whenever they go outside.
Why did you feel the need to deride someone for simply expressing their opinion? Do you think it helps the discussion?
I meant no disrespect. The horse poop outside was a metaphor for side effects.
During my brief exploration of Haskell, I went to great lengths to avoid dealing with side effects, and when I couldn't avoid them, the pure functional solutions were pretty painful to learn.
Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)
#90I'm of the opinion that there is only one lisp right now with some serious potential to dominate in the future, and that is Racket. Why? For one very simple reason: unlike all other lisps, there is serious, ongoing, and lengthy research into correctly bringing a static type-checking process to the language. Clojure's core.typed doesn't count here, as it is full of significant holes that invalidate its entire point --…
What makes the Racket model more correct than the system based in Sequent Calculus [1] provided by Shen? [1] - http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/types/types_sequent_c...
This is the first I've heard of Shen, so I can't say.
However the Racket engineers, particularly Matthias Felleisen, are doing cutting-edge research into types. Typing is not a solved problem, because if it was, there wouldn't be a static vs dynamic type debate that lingers ad nauseum.
Racket is in an interesting sweet spot for typing research because it is a traditional lisp with dynamic types, to which gradual typing that works both in typed and untyped land has been introduced and continues to undergo extensive attention.