Why Lisp Is Unpopular • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#71

Post by stevecooperorg » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:26 PM UTC

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…

"The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P"

Please don't call me a weed.

You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language makes it easier to get to the programming. I can't think of a worse-supported production language than lisp.

Also, the benefits you mention are either not that uncommon, or that valuable. The only thing lisp has as a unique feature is it's macro system, thanks to it's syntax. It's the only thing that can't be adapted straight into another language. Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions.

The thing is, I wanted to believe. I stocked up my library with PCL, SICP, the little schemer, and On Lisp. I learned emacs. I stuggled with asdf. What I found, though, did not seem to live up to the promise of a hidden pearl.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#72

Post by Hexstream » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:26 PM UTC

hernan7 wrote: post #66

Hexstream wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You're saying nobody can become proficient (not "deeply conversant") in lisp in 3 months because I can't become deeply conversant in lambda calculus in 3 months?!

nobody, proficient, lisp. I, deeply conversant, lambda calculus. You're comparing apples and oranges.

I learned lisp (pretty deeply, I'd qualify myself as intermediate then and now) in what... 5 or 6 months? And I was alone. And I didn't know emacs. With some coaching and pointers I'm pretty sure I could have made it in 4. Aren't you happy?

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#73

Post by gordianknot » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:26 PM UTC

jcl wrote: post #69

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.

Thanks for the tip. I've heard some good things about Lua, but never gone further than Wikipedia.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#74

Post by anamax » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:27 PM UTC

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…

While lisp code is represented as lists, other user data can be represented with hash tables, vectors, arrays, classes, etc, including lists. (Yes, the name "lisp" refers to lists, but the language has grown since the name was picked.)

Also, it's easy to represent arbitrary graphs with lists, in much the same way that you'd do so with hash tables, structs, etc. Yes, the way that a node refers to other nodes differs but there's no restriction on the relationship of the nodes or the overall structure. (The difference between different kinds of graphs has nothing to do with how one node refers to another.)

And, macros have nothing to do with any of this because they are "just" code that turns code into other code. Perhaps another code representation would be better than lisp's, but since few languages have one, and some of those that do break it with every release....

In short, Gordianknot's thesis and examples are wrong, he doesn't understand graphs, and he has no idea what macros do.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#75

Post by dpapathanasiou » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:29 PM UTC

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.

Parenthesis fade into the background with experience (especially if your code is well-formatted), in the same way you start to group things by curly braces in C or Java over time.

No one looks at C code the first time and thinks it's clear to understand.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#76

Post by gordianknot » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:30 PM UTC

Hexstream wrote: post #63

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?

Really what are classes other than sugary hashtables?

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#77

Post by Hexstream » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:33 PM UTC

stevecooperorg wrote: post #71

Hexstream wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P" Please don't call me a weed. You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language mak…

"Please don't call me a weed."

Sorry :(

"You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language makes it easier to get to the programming. I can't think of a worse-supported production language than lisp."

I agree.

"Also, the benefits you mention are either not that uncommon, or that valuable. The only thing lisp has as a unique feature is it's macro system, thanks to it's syntax. It's the only thing that can't be adapted straight into another language. Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions."

Well, it's uncommon and valuable to have all of them in a coherent language. Especially since they're pretty orthogonal features that complement eachother well. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

"The thing is, I wanted to believe. I stocked up my library with PCL, SICP, the little schemer, and On Lisp. I learned emacs. I stuggled with asdf. What I found, though, did not seem to live up to the promise of a hidden pearl."

I'm sorry that you've come to the conclusion lisp is not right for you. Maybe in a couple years you can try again and most implementation/library/documentation/etc issues will be resolved?

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#78

Post by stevecooperorg » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:45 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #20

pTymN wrote: post #6

How to make Lisp popular (or as popular as Lisp will ever get): 1) SBCL working very well on the big three PC platforms. 2) Bindings + easy installation for popular libraries. 3) Education (pg's articles, everything on planet.lisp.org) 4) Solid debugging, perhaps with things like breakpoints. There is much activity on all 4 problem items that I identified above, so Lisp IS getting more popular. I don't know if progra…

I think the problem Lisp has is that very few people are forced to use it. If you look at the average programmer, he doesn't want to think about programming, he just wants to press keys an go home. So a language that requires you to think instead of type is not something that he is going to flock to. I think the sad reality is that most programmers aren't very smart, so smart languages will never become popular. I'm…

"If you look at the average programmer, he doesn't want to think about programming"

This is nonsense. You can't just 'press keys and go home' and make working software. Most of the programmers I've worked with thought a great deal about programming.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#79

Post by gordianknot » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:50 PM UTC

edu wrote: post #61

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 langu…

I've never looked at CLOS. But, what I mean is the "dominant metaphor," which I suspect is still lists.

I'll just go through my probably plebeian understanding. Arrays are to lists as hashtables are to objects. An array, in my mind, is a list that only contains one type and is indexed with enumerated integers. On the other hand a list can contain any type, but is also indexed with enumerated integers.

In JavaScript:

  array = [1, 2, 3]
  list = ["one", [[array], 3]]
  array[0] == 1
  list[20] = 23 // list indices aren't necessarily a linear enumeration

Of course, arrays and lists are both technically Arrays in JavaScript (a bad naming choice; I'd have called them Lists). Now a hashtable is typically just a list that uses strings for indices instead of integers.

  hashtable = {
    "today":20080403,
    future:function(x) { return this.today + x }
  }

A "method" is just a value that happens to be a function. Usually hashtable-oriented languages choose to abstract away the string, and treat it as a variable.

  hashtable["today"] == hashtable.today
  hashtable.method(23)

Like with lists/arrays, JavaScript gets hashtables/objects almost exactly right, but again is subject to some questionable naming choices.

RE: trees and graphs -- I was getting at the relationships between nodes, not the actual computations, but I'm not comfortable enough with the terminology to explain exactly what I meant.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#80

Post by emfle » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 7:51 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #20

pTymN wrote: post #6

How to make Lisp popular (or as popular as Lisp will ever get): 1) SBCL working very well on the big three PC platforms. 2) Bindings + easy installation for popular libraries. 3) Education (pg's articles, everything on planet.lisp.org) 4) Solid debugging, perhaps with things like breakpoints. There is much activity on all 4 problem items that I identified above, so Lisp IS getting more popular. I don't know if progra…

I think the problem Lisp has is that very few people are forced to use it. If you look at the average programmer, he doesn't want to think about programming, he just wants to press keys an go home. So a language that requires you to think instead of type is not something that he is going to flock to. I think the sad reality is that most programmers aren't very smart, so smart languages will never become popular. I'm…

I think most people prefer languages that let them think about the problem they are trying to solve, rather than think about what the macros expand to, or what happens when they call that continuation.