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Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

smuglispweeny.blogspot.com

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Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#91

Post by coldtea »

gkya wrote: post #77
Frondo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Emacs's been shipping for three decades. It's the eldest of the living open source software.

Compared to bsd userland?

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#92

Post by ubertaco »

ww520 wrote: post #44

I want to see people's list of reasons for why not lisp. Edit: Ok, this is not trolling. I quite liked Lisp and actually had implemented a version of common lisp from scratch based the Guy Steele's CL reference back in the undergrad time. I just found that beyond academic and a few Emacs packages, I didn't use Lisp at all, for one reason or the other. I just want to hear people's reason for not picking Lisp for their…

I've tried on a few occasions to really like Lisp. I love it's simplicity and recursiveness. The "code as data, data as code" thing is really cool.

But I love static typing. Not only for "safety-net" reasons, where the compiler lets you know that you've broken stuff, but also for documentation reasons (I don't have to guess at the shape of each "c" in "cs" in "(mapcar some-fun cs)", I can just look at its type and know its shape), and I really like it when that type system lets me be more expressive, like in MLs (where I can pattern-match by the various members of an ADT and destructure them as I go).

I also find that idiomatic Lisp likes to nest things too much to be really readable for me. If I don't have types to tell me how the data's being transformed, at least give me named functions and well-named variables instead of very-deeply-nested anonymous functions everywhere.

And finally, I've never been completely convinced that macros are a great idea. They're far too easily abused to create "the Scala problem" of having code in language X that is still unrecognizable to someone else who also writes in language X.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#93

Post by GlennS »

hahooooo wrote: post #27

Is there any advantage in using a functional language when programming non-mathematically related code? I see how it can help write Neural Networks, AI, financial code, etc. But if you know Python,Ruby,PHP,Java and Lisp (well), why would you choose to write a blog, webstore, webmail client or social media* app (which probably is about 90% of what people actually do) in Lisp over the four three? I'll tell you why I wo…

I'd say web's request -> response model is pretty well suited to functional programming.

It seems popular amongst JavaScript programmers at the moment as well. React, which appears the current hotness, is based on making a functional interface to the DOM.

Although actually, I'd say the main reason to use a Lisp for web gunk is the macros rather than the functional programming. The tree structure maps very naturally onto HTML generation. There are some really nice libraries (in particular I'm familiar with Clojure libraries) which make the server-side part of a web app really neat. You can basically skip the whole 'templating' bit.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#94

Post by diminishedprime »

kqr wrote: post #51
ww520 wrote: post #44

I want to see people's list of reasons for why not lisp. Edit: Ok, this is not trolling. I quite liked Lisp and actually had implemented a version of common lisp from scratch based the Guy Steele's CL reference back in the undergrad time. I just found that beyond academic and a few Emacs packages, I didn't use Lisp at all, for one reason or the other. I just want to hear people's reason for not picking Lisp for their…

I dislike Lisp (and Lisp-inspired languages like Scheme and Clojure) for two reasons: 1. their weak and dynamic type system, and 2. they don't control side-effects.

I'll agree that clojure doesn't enforce control of side-effects. But with the recent work on clojure.spec, your first complaint has become (even more of) an asset.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#95

Post by mark_l_watson »

snaky wrote: post #60
Frondo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> doing anyone any good There's a difference between doing and talking about. Compare an amount of noise from Rust crowd to anything useful being done in Rust. Let's look at only one product implemented in Lisp, by only one vendor, and it's users in only one industry - http://allegrograph.com/healthcare/ . Pfizer, Mayo Clinic, GSK, Novartis - should we stop with that 'doing anyone any good' mantra?

AllegroGraph is a great example. I wrote a book (actually 2 books, with Java and Common Lisp editions) using AllegroGraph. A free PDFs of both editions are available on the book page on my website.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#96

Post by spdionis »

agentgt wrote: post #21
ohyes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased, but there's a big difference between "learning lisp" (well enough to transliterate that python program) and really getting the code as data concept. I'd say that learning X really well is always a positive because whenever you learn something in depth you can then apply the concepts elsewhere. And there are still lisp-only concepts, so learning lisp is positive. ML is good too. Also spending time with a w…

With Lisp I get the data thing but with ML you learn almost everything is a language. I can't really explain it but the whole variant/ADT pattern matching really forces to make you think of your problem domain as a specification or language (e.g. DSL). It is one of the reason why I think so many compilers are written in ML (that and the toolset is awesome for it).

Pattern matching is the feature i enjoy most in functional languages. It's simple to use and comes with great value.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#97

Post by mark_l_watson »

junke wrote: post #83
nurettin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

CAPI is pretty nice. Years ago, LispWorks gave me free licenses in return for my doing some cleanup on their documentation. LispWorks is very good, but my licenses are for what is now a very old version, so I now use SBCL and sometimes Clozure. For industrial settings, LispWorks and also Franz are very good products. I used Franz products on a medical large data project several years ago, and their support was nothing short of amazing. That said, on the same project we had an issue with SBCL and we simply paid one of the maintainers to promptly fix the issue.

Sometimes it just takes spending some money.

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#99

Post by cwmma »

The whole manipulating code as date just always seems like such a rich target for exploitation like that ruby yaml bug from a while ago [0]. It seems like a features that would be great if your code never needs data from anywhere else but as soon as you gave data coming in from other sources it would be a bit of a nightmare.

0: http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2013/01/10/rails-remote-cod...

Re: Ooh Ooh My Turn Why Lisp? (2008)

#100

Post by joshmarlow »

ubertaco wrote: post #92
ww520 wrote: post #44

I want to see people's list of reasons for why not lisp. Edit: Ok, this is not trolling. I quite liked Lisp and actually had implemented a version of common lisp from scratch based the Guy Steele's CL reference back in the undergrad time. I just found that beyond academic and a few Emacs packages, I didn't use Lisp at all, for one reason or the other. I just want to hear people's reason for not picking Lisp for their…

I've tried on a few occasions to really like Lisp. I love it's simplicity and recursiveness. The "code as data, data as code" thing is really cool. But I love static typing. Not only for "safety-net" reasons, where the compiler lets you know that you've broken stuff, but also for documentation reasons (I don't have to guess at the shape of each "c" in "cs" in "(mapcar some-fun cs)", I can just look at its type and kn…

I totally agree with you here; statically typed languages (OMG OCaml) are great for making code very readable/documented, IMHO. I just have so much more confidence in my code when the compiler has my back.

Another commenter pointed this out, but Typed Racket is a Racket variant (which is a scheme-ish variant) that implements "gradual typing". I've played with it here and there and am about to dive in again.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/

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