Common Lisp homepage • Hacker News Board

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#21

Post by lenkite » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

susam wrote: post #7

Lisp is quite popular at my current workplace. A few popular open source projects published by our organization have been written in Clojure (a dialect of Lisp that runs on JVM and CLR). A few domain specific languages used internally in our organization are also inspired by Lisp. On a more personal front, I find Lisp to be simple, elegant, and expressive. I use Common Lisp (SBCL) for personal use. Working with Lisp…

I liked clojure when I dived into it but lack of static typing is a pain especially once you have got used to the wonderful refactoring and code-intelligence abilities you get by adopting the tools of static typed programming languages like Java/Go/C#/F#. Also performance!

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#22

Post by chimprich » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

susam wrote: post #7

Lisp is quite popular at my current workplace. A few popular open source projects published by our organization have been written in Clojure (a dialect of Lisp that runs on JVM and CLR). A few domain specific languages used internally in our organization are also inspired by Lisp. On a more personal front, I find Lisp to be simple, elegant, and expressive. I use Common Lisp (SBCL) for personal use. Working with Lisp…

> I sometimes wonder why Lisp has not been more popular in the technology industry.

I think one of the problems is one of marketing.

The hackers of the 60s wouldn't have cared but there must be a number of people and businesses since who have been put off, consciously or unconsciously, by the language having the same name as a speech impediment.

I'm being entirely serious; I think the language would have been more popular with a cooler name.

Another problem is a perception of Lisp as being an old language. When I tell work colleagues about how great Lisp is, they're put off by it having been around a long time. I tell them that's ridiculous, the /computer/ has been around a long time, should we abandon that? But it is an uphill struggle.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#23

Post by rurban » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

elbear wrote: post #19

I know the article is about Common Lisp, but I have a question about Racket, Typed Racket specifically. Can anyone say if types and Lisp play well together? Are there any success stories?

Types are supported since the 80ies, with (the) and optional declarations. Almost nobody uses them. Well, CL says: types are always carried around in every value, so we do have types, and we are always type-safe. Which is a proper point.

Then SBCL has superior internal type support in its python compiler, leading to many optimizations. It creates specialized copies of typed methods, and has a nice optimizer framework to deal with that.

Felleisen (Typed Racket) seems to hate types, he summarizes it with types make racket slower, not faster. But he is still developing the only seriously typed scheme effort. Forgot about Stalin, but if I remember correctly it was similar to the CMUCL/python type optimizer.

In my dynamic language I've implemented gradual typing with great success (cperl): more precise, producing better specialized code, faster, detecting more errors at compile-time and better documentation, so I'm sceptical why Felleisen has so many problems. But I implemented it with performance in mind (premature optimization and such), not completeness. Typed php seems also to go well, also the various JavaScript variants. Just scheme, python and ruby not so.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#24

Post by lispm » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

For those who want to use Lisp on the JVM, there is ABCL:

https://abcl.org

ABCL was originally used to write and extend an editor called J - but then morphed into a full implementation of Common Lisp.

One can also develop with SBCL - since it has a great compiler - and then move the code to ABCL.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#25

Post by agumonkey » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

susam wrote: post #7

Lisp is quite popular at my current workplace. A few popular open source projects published by our organization have been written in Clojure (a dialect of Lisp that runs on JVM and CLR). A few domain specific languages used internally in our organization are also inspired by Lisp. On a more personal front, I find Lisp to be simple, elegant, and expressive. I use Common Lisp (SBCL) for personal use. Working with Lisp…

To me it's because lisp offer is too conceptual in a way. Lisp AST like faux-syntax, freedom of idioms, macros... to most it's a problem more than a feature. I believe a huge amount of people prefer the comfort and "magic" of strong grammatical separation. They like considering a language like a set of tools to learn rather than a set of concepts to craft whatever is possible. It also leverage social structures more. You're the coder, not the language designer, not the compiler writer etc etc People like that sort of distribution of work, even though it means you're dependant on these groups which can slow you down.

For complex problems, without clear solution, Lisp is still used (from what I've read) because the people on these tasks are actually looking to find the right concepts and needs a metamaterial rather than a fixed set of bricks.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#26

Post by lunchladydoris » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

If you fancy giving Lisp a try, look into Portacle [0]. I've not used this exactly but I did install all the components myself over time and they play together nicely.

[0]: https://portacle.github.io/

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#27

Post by xyrouter » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #20

Nice web site! I have been using Common Lisp since 1983 when I updated my Xerox 1108 Lisp Nachine. In the last 35 years I have probably only averaged using Commin Lisp for about 10% of my development but still love the language. One problem the Lisp world has is too many fine implementations of dialects of different Lisp languages. I find it impossible to not experiment with most of them.

What insights do you gain by experimenting with different implementations of Common Lisp? Can you share some of those insights or things you learnt by experimenting with different implementations of Common Lisp?

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#28

Post by xyrouter » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

chimprich wrote: post #22

susam wrote: post #7

Lisp is quite popular at my current workplace. A few popular open source projects published by our organization have been written in Clojure (a dialect of Lisp that runs on JVM and CLR). A few domain specific languages used internally in our organization are also inspired by Lisp. On a more personal front, I find Lisp to be simple, elegant, and expressive. I use Common Lisp (SBCL) for personal use. Working with Lisp…

> I sometimes wonder why Lisp has not been more popular in the technology industry. I think one of the problems is one of marketing. The hackers of the 60s wouldn't have cared but there must be a number of people and businesses since who have been put off, consciously or unconsciously, by the language having the same name as a speech impediment. I'm being entirely serious; I think the language would have been more po…

> I'm being entirely serious; I think the language would have been more popular with a cooler name.

How do you explain the lack of popularity of Lisp dialects that do not use "Lisp" in their name, for example, Arc, Racket and Clojure. I know that HN was written in Arc, Arc was written in Racket and Clojure is used in a handful of companies but a far greater number of companies and projects use Python.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#29

Post by e12e » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

elbear wrote: post #19

I know the article is about Common Lisp, but I have a question about Racket, Typed Racket specifically. Can anyone say if types and Lisp play well together? Are there any success stories?

You might also want to have a look at Julia. It's not really a lisp, but it sits on top of a scheme - and it has a rather interesting, pragmatic type system:

"Julia: to lisp or not to lisp?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3zRXhrFZY

https://julialang.org/

Maybe compare and contrast with Maxima?:

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#30

Post by xyrouter » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:52 AM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #21

susam wrote: post #7

Lisp is quite popular at my current workplace. A few popular open source projects published by our organization have been written in Clojure (a dialect of Lisp that runs on JVM and CLR). A few domain specific languages used internally in our organization are also inspired by Lisp. On a more personal front, I find Lisp to be simple, elegant, and expressive. I use Common Lisp (SBCL) for personal use. Working with Lisp…

I liked clojure when I dived into it but lack of static typing is a pain especially once you have got used to the wonderful refactoring and code-intelligence abilities you get by adopting the tools of static typed programming languages like Java/Go/C#/F#. Also performance!

The lack of static typing does not explain why there are so many companies using Python, Ruby and Perl but very few using Lisp. If the lack of static typing was the real cause of the lack of popularity of Lisp then Python, Ruby and Perl also would have been unpopular.