51–60 of 115 posts
Tcl is a better lisp than Ruby. Homoiconic. Yield and tailcall make it easy to implement FP idioms. Macros available if needed.
Wish more people understood this about tcl
I remember tcl in the early 90s then it disappeared from my radar, mostly web and mobile apps. Honest question: is it still relevant in some application area?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. Meh, the lack of Macros aren't a problem. The problem is lack of arbitrary code transformation, which isn't as fixable.
There is arbitrary code transformation in tcl through subst or string map
Oh, wait.
For a 2005 article, this is totally awesome, as well as that Steve Yegge response. But in 2016, it's hard for me not to get excited about what's seeming like Clojure's upward trajectory into the mainstream and want to jump on board 100%. To paraphrase Rich Hickey, Lisp and immutable functional programming totally rock, and the JVM and Javascript just reach (ClojureScript). As our systems get bigger and more quality i…
Personally, I greatly prefer ML style languages to lisp style languages. I get fed up with all the parentheses in lisps.
For a 2005 article, this is totally awesome, as well as that Steve Yegge response. But in 2016, it's hard for me not to get excited about what's seeming like Clojure's upward trajectory into the mainstream and want to jump on board 100%. To paraphrase Rich Hickey, Lisp and immutable functional programming totally rock, and the JVM and Javascript just reach (ClojureScript). As our systems get bigger and more quality i…
There's a reason there will never be a universal language.
Author here. Let me explain where this article came from, since people keep digging it up every few years to discuss it. :-) I spent some time during the late 90s learning all kinds of cool ways to use Lisp, courtesy of a couple Boston startups, including IS Robotics (now better known as iRobot). And I'd helped introduce Scheme to another employer. Scheme made it ridiculously easy to create domain-specific languages,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I missed the original postings so it's nice to see this for the first time. That would be difficult if HN didn't allow reposts. Though I can understand if I had seen it already.
That's actually a good point. On a sidenote, I get a weird feeling from HN's simple UI/UX. On one hand, it feels like the old CLI machines that put the focus on "content" - kinda like "do one thing and do it right". On the other hand, reading all the comments, getting notified for replies on comments, etc. is really hard. In this day and age, one would wonder if HN really hates JS (well, except for the upvote button)…
They could also use a better CSS but who cares, text is king in this kind of sites. It displays quite well on mobile too, especially with Opera which reflows text after zoom (the very reason for using Opera).
Author here. Let me explain where this article came from, since people keep digging it up every few years to discuss it. :-) I spent some time during the late 90s learning all kinds of cool ways to use Lisp, courtesy of a couple Boston startups, including IS Robotics (now better known as iRobot). And I'd helped introduce Scheme to another employer. Scheme made it ridiculously easy to create domain-specific languages,…
OFF-TOPIC: Why Lisp was so popular in Boston ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wish more people understood this about tcl
Maybe this is meta (the wish) :-) I remember tcl in the early 90s then it disappeared from my radar, mostly web and mobile apps. Honest question: is it still relevant in some application area?
So while it's not as popular, relevancy isn't an issue.
For a 2005 article, this is totally awesome, as well as that Steve Yegge response. But in 2016, it's hard for me not to get excited about what's seeming like Clojure's upward trajectory into the mainstream and want to jump on board 100%. To paraphrase Rich Hickey, Lisp and immutable functional programming totally rock, and the JVM and Javascript just reach (ClojureScript). As our systems get bigger and more quality i…
...No. Clojure is lisp, but it's a weird little language, and most of us lispers schemers aren't really totally happy with it. We're used to more flexability, less functionalism, and less opinionation. Plus, Clojure's equality and conses don't work at all the way a lisper would expect, and the conses are way less useful. There's a reason there will never be a universal language.
Personally I'm happy equality doesn't work like common lisp. See here for a post explaining equality in CL: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2004/08/08/equality-in-lisp
It's old and I don't use common lisp, so please correct me or the post if needed.
I've tried to get into lisp numerous times. Clojure was the one that clicked for me. I can't say if that's because of clojure or because it was just the right time for me after N times trying to get lisp.
Every now and then I poke at a scheme or CL. Scheme seems do-able for me, particularly Chicken Scheme, but I everytime I try CL, I come across what seems like too many functions to do what it seems like one function should do. Whenever I see something like SETQ, etc., that's a big turn off for me.
On the other hand, I really dislike Clojure startup times. Doesn't matter for server/long running apps, but when you are debugging or iterating, it gets to be a pain. There are some mitigations with their own set of issues.
Pixie and Hy have been brought to my attention. Pixie seems more or less abandoned, but Hy looks interesting. I haven't been able to tell from the docs if it has clojure datastructures (which are the best part of clojure), but Pixie does. So maybe sometime I'll try to bring those over to Hy and see if they get accepted.