This is really well written and seems to agree with the traditional FP lore. I'm curious what led Alan Kay then to OOP in Smalltalk.
Alan Kay on Lisp
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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#12I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations. Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages. > The key was not so much “Lisp” but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes. > A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right…
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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#13I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations. Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages. > The key was not so much “Lisp” but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes. > A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right…
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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#14I'm always blown away by how crisply is Alan Kay able to put complex thoughts into words. I feel that the level of clarity I can achieve on the scale of a sentence or two he can achieve on the scale of several paragraphs.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#15I'm always blown away by how crisply is Alan Kay able to put complex thoughts into words. I feel that the level of clarity I can achieve on the scale of a sentence or two he can achieve on the scale of several paragraphs.
Counterpoint:
The words he says are nice, and his depth of knowledge is profound, but he hasn't actually provided any evidence making the case that lisp is better and/or in what scenarios it is better.
That this sort of rhetoric is the way almost all programmers and language designers try to find truth and communicate ideas is probably why we ended up all programming in javascript. We have no rigor, we are like Freud era psychology with flowering and impressive sounding prose but no real data. And while psychology still has a long way to go, we have even further.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#16This is really well written and seems to agree with the traditional FP lore. I'm curious what led Alan Kay then to OOP in Smalltalk.
Whatever Alan Kay thinks OOP is, it isn't what we think it is.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#17I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations. Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages. > The key was not so much “Lisp” but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes. > A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right…
>Or else, you didn't really grok it.
Only if you believe that the only good thing one should grok is the data/code parity part.
For me Smalltalk is even better and more concise than Lisp is.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#18Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#19This is really well written and seems to agree with the traditional FP lore. I'm curious what led Alan Kay then to OOP in Smalltalk.
Alan Kay OOP is a lot closer to the Actor model that you see in languages like Erlang. To be overly reductive, its all message passing and not-exposed state.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#20I'm always blown away by how crisply is Alan Kay able to put complex thoughts into words. I feel that the level of clarity I can achieve on the scale of a sentence or two he can achieve on the scale of several paragraphs.
Counterpoint: The words he says are nice, and his depth of knowledge is profound, but he hasn't actually provided any evidence making the case that lisp is better and/or in what scenarios it is better. That this sort of rhetoric is the way almost all programmers and language designers try to find truth and communicate ideas is probably why we ended up all programming in javascript. We have no rigor, we are like Freud…
Agreed, and well said.
I'm very much a pragmatic kind of person, and my unpopular opinion about code is that Lisp is the greatest single language ever designed, if your goal in designing a language is to produce articles proclaiming it as such.
And I am sooo sympathetic to the promises Lispers make. I want to believe. But ultimately, show me the code. Why are the stellar Lisp success stories so few and far between that one of the big ones is Paul Graham's from the 90s?
If it's so powerful that almost no one can use it, and it rules in almost no problem domains, ... how is it so powerful again?