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Why Lisp Is Unpopular

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Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#61

Post by edu »

gordianknot wrote: post #27

The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren. (These orientations are often misguidedly referred to as "functional" and "object-oriented" paradigms, which I find to be useless, over-overloaded terms.) Basically, with list-oriented langs the primary abstractio…

And what about CLOS? Does not make Lisp, in your words, a "hash programming language"?

Really I don't get the difference you state between list/hash programming languages, I've work a little with EcmaScript and I don't know anything about Io, but I'll put it in my to-do list. Can you, please, extend it? What's the main difference between them?

Because you say that the primary abstraction of a "list" programming language is a tree, which I think not. Since a tree is a directed graph without cycles, you wouldn't have loops. So, at least is a directed graph. But then, which property has the "hash" language graph that the "list" language graph has not? It's an undirected graph? It think it is not possible, because if it's undirected how do make your program to go "forward" and not "backward"?

I hope I'm not too obfuscated and my questions make some sense.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#62

Post by jrockway »

edu wrote: post #34
jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your hatred for Perl is unfair. Yes, eval and strings is a terrible substitute for macros. Only an idiot would pretend otherwise. But 90% of the time, the other tools we do have available (first-class functions, everything internal being dynamic) lets us get by. For example, a few months ago I was working on a blog post about how nice it would be if Perl had macros. I had a perfect example picked out, but I d…

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't want to mean that Perl is a bad language at all. I was trying to explain my experience with my fellow coworkers, who happened to love perl. Actually, for the last 3 years I've been using it at work, including first-class functions (and Catalyst ;)), and I've it enjoyed quite a lot. I've some minor issues with it's syntax (for my taste too much sigils, but I understand why they are there). What…

The source repository is here:

http://git.jrock.us/?p=Perlisp.git;a=summary

It's pretty useless right now though :) I started rewriting the reader, but didn't like any of the parsing modules on CPAN... so it's sitting at that stage right now. When I get some tuits, I'll probably just port over SBCL's reader, or perhaps emacs'.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#63

Post by Hexstream »

gordianknot wrote: post #27

The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren. (These orientations are often misguidedly referred to as "functional" and "object-oriented" paradigms, which I find to be useless, over-overloaded terms.) Basically, with list-oriented langs the primary abstractio…

I don't understand why Java is "hashtable-oriented"...

What design flaws of Lisp are seen as features?

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#64

Post by edu »

tfinniga wrote: post #47
edu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Lisp is not a functional language. You can do procedural programming with it, moreover I think that nowadays the usual Lisp program is either procedural, OOP or a mix. You really don't need to rely on Emacs+Slime, an editor with a good support for indentation will suffice. IIRC, pg codes in Vi (or Vim). The idea is that, like in C/C++, good indentation is enough to determine the nesting so you don't need to count…

Good points. Perhaps the problem is also how lisp is taught? When I learned lisp, the procedural aspects of lisp were shown, but with the understanding that they were bad, and not to be used. Probably because it was shown as a functional language, and was meant to be used as such. Similar to how, say, c++'s functional programming capabilities aren't really taught. If the indentation is sufficient, why not just remove…

Well, to some extent there exists a unparenthesized version of Lisp: Logo :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29

And for the names used for the keywords and builtins, I agree with you.

About the +/add, I really don't see too much problem.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#65

Post by shiranaihito »

stevecooperorg wrote: post #31
brlewis wrote: post #2

There are many hypotheses out there that Lisp lacks popularity for this or that flaw in the language or in the community. The problem with these hypotheses is that you can point to similar or bigger flaws in languages that have grown popular. If a language has good qualities, people will figure out ways around the problems. My hypothesis is that Lisp is unpopular for the exact same reason some of us love it: concise…

I really don't find that lisp, at least common lisp, is particularly concise. Consider lambda functions, one of those things that lisp is particularly praised for; common lisp: (lambda (x) (+ x 1)) C#3 : x=> x + 1 ruby : { |x| x + 1 } python : lambda x: x + 1 Haskell : \x -> x + 1 Just in terms of character count, CL is the longest of the lot. No, the problem with trying to get a lisp under your belt has alredy been…

> - choosing an implementation is a research project (clisp? sbcl? allegro?) - documentation is weaker - libraries are harder to find and install (ASDF vs Rubygems, Python eggs, etc.) - emacs/slime is an investment to learn - examples are few and far between - the language itself (the words, not the punctuation) is inelegant (mapcar, setq, cdadr)

- Exactly.

Last year I started reading about Lisp etc, and wanted to play with it a little bit.

These are the exact same obstacles I faced.

If you ask about "IDEs" for Lisp, you're met with downright hostility for not embracing the glory of emacs with open arms - anything else is just unfathomable.

Well, what if I'd like to just, you know, start using the language, and not learn a whole new world of an editor first?

"Why does emacs + SLIME have to be the only viable option?"

That's not a question you can ask, of course, but the answer would be something like "roll your own" anytime you need anything.

(Oh, and Xach is a prick. He and Krysztov(or whatever) are practically high-fiving each other on IRC every time they alienate another new would-be Lisper)

As for the implementation research, I sort of came to the conclusion that SBCL was the way to go, but documentation (for anything?) was pretty scarce, and ASDF feels like an obstacle too.

Later on, I realized that Scheme is more elegant as a language, but it's more or less in the same situation as CL.

Compared to these two, something like Python feels much more accessible to me (being a novice at all), because I get the feeling that I can just start using things whenever I want to make that effort.

But that's just it - with Python, there's only the effort of learning the language as you use it.

You learn the standard library as you go, and suddenly you notice you've accomplished a lot of things and had fun while at it.

- At least that's how I imagine it will be when I get around to working on my own super-secret web-startupy project.

With Lisps, you need to make a lot of effort just to get to the beginning, and that's a big problem.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#66

Post by hernan7 »

Hexstream wrote: post #60
stevecooperorg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't find that lisp, at least common lisp, is particularly concise. Consider lambda functions, one of those things that lisp is particularly praised for; common lisp: (lambda (x) (+ x 1)) C#3 : x=> x + 1 ruby : { |x| x + 1 } python : lambda x: x + 1 Haskell : \x -> x + 1 Just in terms of character count, CL is the longest of the lot. No, the problem with trying to get a lisp under your belt has alredy been…

"I've tried really hard to learn lisp, and it turns out that actually, while there may be some platonic lisp that IS great, actually programming common lisp, now, is a massive effort in struggling in the dark." The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P You usually get rewards proportional to the effort... I don't think lisp is beyond anyone's reach if they work faithfully on gaining proficiency in it for 3 mo…

Make it: 3 months full time, plus whatever amount of time is needed to become deeply conversant with all the underlying lambda calculus concepts.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#67

Post by hernan7 »

pg wrote: post #28

I don't understand. Is the claim that Lisp is less popular now because years ago large numbers of programmers working on government-sponsored projects had to use it, but now proportionately fewer programmers work on government-sponsored projects?

Or that there are less government-sponsored AI projects?

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#68

Post by hernan7 »

tfinniga wrote: post #32
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best retort to the parenthesis complaint is: " I like to ask people who complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the spaces between words in a newspaper. " ( http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-hell-is-fortu... )

Well if you ignore the human visual processing system, that's a valid argument. One ascii character is just the same as the next. Unfortunately for lisp, that's not the case. Whitespace is different than lines. There's a reason most people can't look past the parens - they're hard to look past.

I think parens would be less of a problem if the indentation conventions were easier on the eyes. Sometimes you need a ruler to figure out those 1-space indentations.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#69

Post by jcl »

gordianknot wrote: post #27

The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren. (These orientations are often misguidedly referred to as "functional" and "object-oriented" paradigms, which I find to be useless, over-overloaded terms.) Basically, with list-oriented langs the primary abstractio…

My tentacles have only found two decent hashtable-oriented languages: JavaScript >~1.5 and Io.

I'm not sure whether or not you'd find it "decent", but you might consider adding Lua to your list. It's small, relatively fast, and uses hashtables as its composite data structure. It also has some other neat stuff, like tail-calls and coroutines.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#70

Post by e40 »

tfinniga wrote: post #32
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best retort to the parenthesis complaint is: " I like to ask people who complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the spaces between words in a newspaper. " ( http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-hell-is-fortu... )

Well if you ignore the human visual processing system, that's a valid argument. One ascii character is just the same as the next. Unfortunately for lisp, that's not the case. Whitespace is different than lines. There's a reason most people can't look past the parens - they're hard to look past.

I think this is a feeble excuse. That is, it's an excuse generated by a lazy mind. The first time I saw Lisp, I was not "primed" to dislike it. It was early in my programming education. I was fresh, as they say. It looked no more cluttered than Pascal, the main language being taught at the time.

Can I write really ugly and hard to visually parse Lisp? Yes. Bad code can be written in any language.

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