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Alan Kay on Lisp

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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#31

Post by azag0 »

borplk wrote: post #26
jackmott wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like Steve Jobs he is amongst the group of people who could say anything anyway they like and some people will find a way to glorify it by a factor of a million. If you remove their name from the things they have said or written, at least many of them seem fairly average sensible statements, like something you would read here from a random member. I'd be interested to see a "blind test" for these things. I bet the bi…

That this happens is of course difficult to disprove. My only defense is that very often, I read things from acclaimed people and think "bullshit". I don't have any particular reason to like what Alan Kay says besides having read previously things from him that I liked.

Also, in this particular case, my point wasn't really about the truth value of what he claims (which I'm not fit to judge), but about the clarity of how he claims it.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#32

Post by Cybiote »

jackmott wrote: post #15
azag0 wrote: post #14

I'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…

I disagree. I found his meaning clear. The core of the essay is that thinking with the right abstractions provides greater boons to reasoning capacity than comparatively trivial differences in human IQ. To make things a bit more concrete, take any game; Go, Poker, Chess. If these were truly (approached as) combinatorial problems then humans could not stand a chance at them. But over time, people have learned patterns, compacted them and shared them such that the average level of play is what masterful players might have once struggled to reach.

Lisp provided concepts captured enough structure that it cut through a lot of combinatorial complexity in the space of possibilities, making reasoning about the construction of computer programs and algorithms a lot less random.

A complaint might be he left out what aspects of Lisp provided that combinatorial boost but I'm sure many HN users could furnish those reasons. But one easy observation is the sheer number of languages and language concepts that are rooted in it. Newtonian physics is not the best physics but it fundamentally changed the way people reasoned about the world. Lisp is not the best language but it fundamentally changed how people reasoned about computer programs.

One objection one might make is that the real Maxwell/Heaviside Equations can instead be found in the Lambda Calculus/ISWIM. Despite the name, Lisp did not originally derive from the lambda calculus but just about all typed functional languages and future versions of lisp are of the LC. But a quick answer to that is influential languages like SASL and Meta Language were prototyped in and strongly influenced by Lisp (cognitive boost).

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#33

Post by [deleted] »

matchagaucho wrote: post #28
azag0 wrote: post #14

I'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.

I'm similarly struck with how open the computer science frontier was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Every effort required some first principles rationalizing to justify the R&D. Alan, and others from Xerox PARC, have a very "meta" outlook on the entire field.

[deleted]

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#34

Post by smhost »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #2

Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…

Do you really hold your own amusement to be the highest value?

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#35

Post by [deleted] »

matchagaucho wrote: post #28
azag0 wrote: post #14

I'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.

I'm similarly struck with how open the computer science frontier was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Every effort required some first principles rationalizing to justify the R&D. Alan, and others from Xerox PARC, have a very "meta" outlook on the entire field.

[deleted]

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#37

Post by kazinator »

coldtea wrote: post #17
kazinator wrote: post #4

I 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.

It seems like it wouldn't be hard to make a Smalltalk-like sub-language inside a Lisp dialect like Common Lisp or Racket. It could be programmed using S-exps, or custom read syntax to make it look like actual Smalltalk.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#38

Post by davexunit »

ohazi wrote: post #29

There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…

There are also plenty of Lisp programmers that think that it's a real tool to solve real problems, not just an educational oddity. There are a bunch of Lisps out there, and plenty of them are by no means toys. My laptop's initial RAM disk and init system are Scheme programs.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#39

Post by aaronchall »

jf wrote: post #22

Posting Alan's reply as a comment below for posterity, since Quora appears to forbid archive.org from making a copy. --- First, let me clear up a few misconceptions from the previous answers. One of them said “Try writing an operating system with Lisp”, as though this would be somehow harder. In fact, one of the nicest operating systems ever done was on “The Lisp Machines” (in Zeta-Lisp), the hardware and software fo…

Thanks for posting this. Much easier to read here.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#40

Post by billsix »

kmicklas wrote: post #11

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.

There are no "if" statements in Smalltalk. You call the"ifTrue:ifFalse" method on an instance of a Boolean, passing two lambdas for the respective cases. To this day I don't know what an "object/functional hybrid language" is, as Smalltalk was always that
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