111–120 of 271 posts
I started a big project at work using Common Lisp in 2017 and could not be happier. Sure, most nice features have trickled down to other languages, but they are rarely as nicely integrated. And Lisp still has many advantages that are not found elsewhere: Unmatched stability, on-demand performance, tunable compiler, CLOS, condition system, and Macros to name a few. It has its warts too but which language does not? I f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mentioned elsewhere I'm learning Common Lisp. I'm also learning Python by translating some Common Lisp code into Python and part of that is to make sure I understand what the Common Lisp is doing. As an understatement, that's meant building some very unPythonic abstractions (yay, me). Anyway, I think there is a fundamental design difference between Common Lisp and other 'first class' programming languages: Common L…
I have a couple REPLs for specific projects that I routinely keep running for months at a time. The idea that user = programmer was part of the MIT AI Lab culture before there were Lisp Machines. For example, the top level of ITS, the PDP-10 OS they used, was the debugger. Imagine if the default Linux shell was GDB!
I started a big project at work using Common Lisp in 2017 and could not be happier. Sure, most nice features have trickled down to other languages, but they are rarely as nicely integrated. And Lisp still has many advantages that are not found elsewhere: Unmatched stability, on-demand performance, tunable compiler, CLOS, condition system, and Macros to name a few. It has its warts too but which language does not? I f…
Curious over why CL vs Clojure? Any comments.
* The common lisp condition system [3, 0] is a way better way to do errors.
* Tune-able compilers [1] allow you to make better trade offs than even gcc allows for c, let alone Clojure's very opaque compiler.
* CLOS [2] is a very powerful object system which clojure does not replicate (they have multi methods, and java classes, but not a meta class system; think python's meta class features but better (because of macros and compiler access) and with multi methods designed in).
* Nice native interoperability (Clojure generally being on the JVM, and common lisp capable of direct calls and memory manipulation).
That being said. Clojure's unparalleled concurrency features are amazing. I would compare them as: if Clojure is the Java of lisps, then Common Lisp is the C++ of lisps.
[0] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...
[1] http://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/compiling...
[2] http://www.laputan.org/pub/papers/MOP.pdf
[3] http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2011/04/whats-condition-syste...
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Most of the traditional definitions of "memory safety" are not violated by having null pointers, as long as they just crash when used incorrectly. nils in Go don't let you start accessing things you shouldn't or anything. Golang is memory safe by most definitions. (Possibly not by a definition that includes concurrent memory safety. I expect in 20 or 30 years the term "memory safe" will indeed involve that. But at th…
I'd put that one under type safety, and it definitely seems bizarre to me to make a new language that claims to have strong, static typing and allow arbitrary types, or pointers to arbitrary types to be null.
I started a big project at work using Common Lisp in 2017 and could not be happier. Sure, most nice features have trickled down to other languages, but they are rarely as nicely integrated. And Lisp still has many advantages that are not found elsewhere: Unmatched stability, on-demand performance, tunable compiler, CLOS, condition system, and Macros to name a few. It has its warts too but which language does not? I f…
which lisp interpreter did you use ?
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It's a seamless dynamic programming language, which can, with care, be given excellent performance and a high level of abstraction. In my opinion, it's miles better than the other dynamic languages out there, by nearly every factor. It rewards investment and development very well; it's a tool for mastery, not for quick and easy starting. If you're looking for statically typed languages, it's not going to win there. B…
Do you prefer it over Clojure? If yes why? I'm a bit versed with Clojure but sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp.
So ymmv.
Performance benchmarks using cl-bench really highlighted some strong points http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~ober/clb AWS Cloudtrail parser. https://github.com/kunabi/kunabi
How does Common Lisp compares to Racket nowadays? I've seen a lot of activity but I can't decide which one to try out. I only have time for one of them ATM.
http://fare.livejournal.com/188429.html
Note that a lot of what Faré likes about racket is somewhat intrinsic in there being one implementation, and a big part of why racket branded itself away from scheme (it was formerly PLT-Scheme).
In lisp there are still a lot of very different implementations in use, so if you want to "grow down" you either have to be non-portable or do a lot more work.
I love Common Lisp, so I will say "learn Common Lisp" but you'll probably be just as happy if you flip a coin (and I would recommend doing so rather than debating much as learning the "wrong" one now is probably better than learning the "right" one in the future).
I wish an experienced LISPer would explain why should one use Common Lisp over a language like Golang. Golang now has https://github.com/glycerine/zygomys for scripting. For that matter, why would one choose Common Lisp over GNU guile ? (guile now supports fibers). What does Common Lisp offer for the working programmer that is an advantage over other languages ?
Given a reasonable choice, I would almost never use a language like Golang that doesn't enforce memory safety (at least, by default). Null pointers, ugh.
If I'm not wrong, this is a non-sequitor on a post about Common Lisp as Common Lisp is untyped, but (by default; some implementations allow you to disable safety) safe.
I started a big project at work using Common Lisp in 2017 and could not be happier. Sure, most nice features have trickled down to other languages, but they are rarely as nicely integrated. And Lisp still has many advantages that are not found elsewhere: Unmatched stability, on-demand performance, tunable compiler, CLOS, condition system, and Macros to name a few. It has its warts too but which language does not? I f…
Curious over why CL vs Clojure? Any comments.
For Clojure the interactive debugging experience is just plain dreadful and for a dynamic language this is pants on head crazy imo. For me a dynamic language has to have a good interactive debugging experience because you have foregone the support of a static compilation and instead wish to reason about your program at runtime. But with the JVM stack traces and lack of interactive debugger Clojure just does not support you in this regard. And as a side note the lack of an identity print is annoying as well e.g. (+ (print 4) (print 4)) "4" "4" 8 (yes, it's easy to add...)
Clojure's decision to use persistent data structures is good but it's really the only standout thing for me other than some syntax sugar like hash maps.