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Alan Kay on Lisp

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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#51

Post by blihp »

kazinator wrote: post #37
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Might be interesting as an academic exercise but doesn't seem like a terribly useful thing to actually do. I like both languages but using Smalltalk syntax in Lisp isn't something I'd want. Besides, Lisp has (IMO) nice optional keyword parameter syntax which fits better in the Lisp world than the Smalltalk message/block syntax ever would.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#52

Post by conistonwater »

metawhatnow wrote: post #43
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…

ML has metaprogramming? The only thing I know approaching that is template haskell, which is a weak form of metaprogramming (still powerful obviously). Meanwhile, lisp is metaprogramming. No, it's not useful in many (or even most) applications, but when it is useful, you can bet there's some type of analogous pattern for a lisp-type language. Certainly still useful to learn along side ML. :) Hell, the best quote to i…

> ML has metaprogramming? The only thing I know approaching that is template haskell, which is a weak form of metaprogramming (still powerful obviously).

Of course, it has had it for a very long time (a decade at least?), see camlp4/camlp5.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#53

Post by JepZ »

Actually, I am missing the simplicity of Lisp and Smalltalk in todays languages. From what I remember, they both have a fairly simple but universal syntax, which can be written for Lisp as

  ([operator] [argument1] [argument2] [argumentN])
and for Smalltalk as

  [object] [message]
So far I haven't seen anything like that for languages with the C-like syntax. Don't get me wrong. For example I love Go, but sometimes I miss the beauty of Lisp and Smalltalk.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#54

Post by muxator »

davexunit wrote: post #38
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.

what are you using? I want to try it.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#55

Post by kazinator »

blihp wrote: post #51
kazinator wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might be interesting as an academic exercise but doesn't seem like a terribly useful thing to actually do. I like both languages but using Smalltalk syntax in Lisp isn't something I'd want. Besides, Lisp has (IMO) nice optional keyword parameter syntax which fits better in the Lisp world than the Smalltalk message/block syntax ever would.

You and I might not want a Smalltalk syntax in Lisp, but someone who favors Smalltalk (like user coldtea to whom I was responding, who finds that Smalltalk is "better and more concise") might want that.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#56

Post by agumonkey »

JepZ wrote: post #53

Actually, I am missing the simplicity of Lisp and Smalltalk in todays languages. From what I remember, they both have a fairly simple but universal syntax, which can be written for Lisp as ([operator] [argument1] [argument2] [argumentN]) and for Smalltalk as [object] [message] So far I haven't seen anything like that for languages with the C-like syntax. Don't get me wrong. For example I love Go, but sometimes I miss…

smalltalk cutest feature is the named parameter syntax trick (I don't like tricks but let's make an exception).

make-range from: 10 to: 20 calss (make-range.from:to 10 20) or something similar. Free nanodsls

smalltalk simplicity lies in that the metamodel is actually human reasoning friendly, even while dynamic, you have a clear picture of what's gonna happen in case of errors etc. It didn't please visual age users, which called smalltalk messagenotunderstoodlang but I believe it was due to the wrong viewpoint.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#57

Post by JepZ »

dang wrote: post #10

A similar recent answer on Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518746 .

Well, there are surprisingly few CS graduates who actually understand Object Oriented Programming as Alan Kay designed it for Smalltalk, which in turn lowers the probabilty that any of them will build a qualitatively better language.

I mean there are a lot of other skills a programmer needs to have than to understand what OOP is, but sometimes I think it would be better if more young students would learn Smalltalk to understand what OOP is about and why the simple existence of classes doesn't make a language an OO language...

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#58

Post by nabla9 »

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.

Lisp programming has never never pure functional programming. It has been sometimes used to teach functional programming, but traditional Lisp's (Common Lisp as good example) has always been multi-paradigm language and object systems in Lisp's are fairly advanced.

Alan Kay's definition of OOP:

>OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#59

Post by Chaebixi »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
JepZ wrote: post #53

Actually, I am missing the simplicity of Lisp and Smalltalk in todays languages. From what I remember, they both have a fairly simple but universal syntax, which can be written for Lisp as ([operator] [argument1] [argument2] [argumentN]) and for Smalltalk as [object] [message] So far I haven't seen anything like that for languages with the C-like syntax. Don't get me wrong. For example I love Go, but sometimes I miss…

smalltalk cutest feature is the named parameter syntax trick (I don't like tricks but let's make an exception). make-range from: 10 to: 20 calss (make-range.from:to 10 20) or something similar. Free nanodsls smalltalk simplicity lies in that the metamodel is actually human reasoning friendly, even while dynamic, you have a clear picture of what's gonna happen in case of errors etc. It didn't please visual age users,…

> metamodel is actually human reasoning friendly

There's so much power in being able to think about a language (or your application) without having to always dig into the code.

Re: Alan Kay on Lisp

#60

Post by tonyg »

xenophonf wrote: post #47
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…

And these operating systems in both Smalltalk and Lisp were both better and easier to write than the standard ones of today. Look, I love Lisp as much as the next hacker, but is Alan Kay for real? Where's the Lisp equivalent to this C code? https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/blinker0... More importantly, where's the accompanying toolchain? Seriously, I really want to know because I'd love, Love, LOVE…

For example, https://github.com/tonyg/pi-nothing/blob/master/kernel.nothi... does something similar to that blinker. It might not be quite what you're after, because it's only superficially a lisp; more an S-expression veneer over something C-like. Toolchain is the rest of the repo. Currently written in Racket. (BTW this is feasibility-study-level stuff, not production stuff. It's messy as hell because I haven't done even the most rudimentary tidying-up of it for public view. Caveat lector.)

But hardware access - replacing C - is the really easy part. The real power of a lisp/Smalltalk OS is getting away from the hardware in one "rocket jump", as Alan put it. Once you can start using integrated high-level language constructs spanning the whole of the abstraction tower from hardware through user interface, that's when it starts to get fun. The really good stuff is the new abstractions you can unlock. Smalltalk is a far better Unix than Unix, from that point of view.

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