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Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

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Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most popular Lisp in use today? Does it come with a static compile type checking?

Rather than most popular, I propose using the most useful. That'd be Lumen. http://github.com/sctb/lumen It's the only lisp that can interface seamlessly with any JS library you want. Just `npm i leftpad && LUMEN_HOST=node lumen` and type `(require 'leftpad)`. $ npm i leftpad $ LUMEN_HOST=node lumen > (require 'leftpad) function > ((require 'leftpad) "foo" 5) "00foo" Other lisps are nice, but they all try to build th…

> And it's very difficult to transpile into JS

How so? The Clojurescript compiler works great and has a massive variety of libraries available, and optimizes well thanks to the closure compiler

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is one of the very few languages where the source code is made of a data structure that the language is very good at manipulating. Thus, writing code that generates code, be it at runtime or at compile-time, is downright easy in Lisp. This opens up enormous possibilities not found in other languages. Also, on regular programming languages, your code executes only at run time. In Lisp, or at least in Common Lisp (a…

Whenever I want someone to understand Lisp being a homoiconic metaprogramming language, I link them this: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

maybe someone can help me understand. I now get homoiconisity but the example he uses doesn't seem to explain why the macro is needed. He explains a problem that can be solved by writing a function. Instead he presents what seems to be in effect an unevaluated function... so what's the point?

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#63
post #23

Code as data is such a big deal that - whatever you say - I will never ever understand why we don't all do Lisps.

What's the most popular Lisp in use today? Does it come with a static compile type checking?

If you are interested in getting into lisp, I would recommend you start with Racket.

Racket has several different languages (the main one called racket) that are all trivially interoperable.

If you want static types, there is typed racket.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#64
post #23

Code as data is such a big deal that - whatever you say - I will never ever understand why we don't all do Lisps.

What's the most popular Lisp in use today? Does it come with a static compile type checking?

Racket is the best Lisp to learn for a few reasons:

1. It was designed to be a teaching language

2. Everything included. You get a great simple IDE and a ton of packages

3. Great teaching materials (I learned the most from HTDP than any other programming book and I have read a ton)

a) How to Design Programs http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

b) http://realmofracket.com/ . Great book I learned a ton and especially when I went through the book with my 11 year old daughter

4. The great minds of Lisp are at Racket (Ever read Little Schemer?)

5. Racket keeps getting better and better with great modern ideas. It might have been born from Academia it has awesome real world legs. Just look how easy it is to deploy your program after you are done.

6. Best documentation system of any language. The documentation is code and it makes for great documents. http://docs.racket-lang.org/

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#65
post #23

Code as data is such a big deal that - whatever you say - I will never ever understand why we don't all do Lisps.

It’s too powerful for the average programmer. Hell, even javascript is too powerful, just look at how a >1 year old codebase looks like.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#66
post #7

Every time, I see one of these links or videos, I feel the urge to learn Lisp. But after some time, I lose the motivation. I think that is because I don't know what benefit learning lisp will provide me concretely. Anyone has any suggestion?

it takes like 3 minutes to learn lisp

It takes three minutes to learn the rules of the game go. Of course it takes years of concerted effort for a human to know how to play it well.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many were newbies in the language, and some were newbies to programming. I wouldn't join this project, no matter what the language is. Imagine it's a popular languae. Javascript or C code, for example. There are no true namespacing / packages and modules facilities in JS or C. It would be even worse than the theoretical nightmare you think Lisp would be. (Lisp has extensive namespacing facilities; code can be conta…

>>Many were newbies in the language, and some were newbies to programming. >I wouldn't join this project, no matter what the language is. Then you will never be employed, because that describes virtually every software project at a for-profit company.

>Then you will never be employed, because that describes virtually every software project at a for-profit company.

I have had 8 years doing software dev (at a for-profit company) most of them as software development director in command of a 15+ people team, thus, I reaffirm what I said: Newbies should be trained first, and only afterwards included in the projects, and that's what I made sure happened on the team, under my command.

They deserve to be trained first, in an environment where they can make mistakes freely until they feel confident.

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unplug my headphones jack halfway to turn failing stereo into good enough bi-mono.

Some please make an ML/Dsp powered magical audio fixer for system sound.

- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pulsectl/17.1.3

- http://larsimmisch.github.io/pyalsaaudio/

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/129412/pulseaudio-and-python...

- http://menno.io/posts/pulseaudio_monitoring/

- http://menno.io/posts/raspberry_pi_vu_meter/

You know exactly what features you'd want. This is my attempt at inspiration. :P

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#69

This is a really good video. Here is a simple timeline of what it is all about, so people can jump to what they would find interesting: 23:43 "It really is incredible that we can go close to one order of magnitude" (to C) 26:00 Lisp code is faster than optimized C (quantum) programs when running on the QVM. For non trivial benchmarks (...) {Lisp faster} on an average of 40% percent. 30:00 quick explanation of quantum…

I guess ParEdit has staying power, but isn't Smartparens[+] the way to go these days?

https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

Re: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]

#70

This is a really good video. Here is a simple timeline of what it is all about, so people can jump to what they would find interesting: 23:43 "It really is incredible that we can go close to one order of magnitude" (to C) 26:00 Lisp code is faster than optimized C (quantum) programs when running on the QVM. For non trivial benchmarks (...) {Lisp faster} on an average of 40% percent. 30:00 quick explanation of quantum…

I guess ParEdit has staying power, but isn't Smartparens[+] the way to go these days? https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

YMMV but for what it's worth I became frustrated with smartparens when I couldn't figure out how to do something very simple. I think it was traversing down into the next sexp. I got different behavior when my cursor was right up against the sexp versus one space before.

Also whereas paredit really pushes me to have a mental model that the lisp source code forms a tree (e.g. up, down, left, and right being the main operations), I found smartparens drove my mental model back to treating the code a string of characters.

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