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Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#51

Post by anjanb »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #10
namelosw wrote: post #4

My personal choice would be Clojure. I learned Racket and Common Lisp but haven't used them build something production-grade yet. I don't even know how to properly build, deploy and monitor a Racket server yet. Racket is good but the toolchain and libraries are far behind Clojure. Especially Cider and Cursive are so great, and for libraries, there are a lot of solid ones like Ring/Compojure, interesting things like D…

Try Clojure. My advise and what wow'ed me the most: install Leinengen the package manager for Clojure and try a hello world web app tutorial that follows Leinengen. Lein will download and install Clojure for you and pull in all the dependencies. Idk any package manager that bootstraps itself like this. All you need is the Lein JAR and obv a JRE installed and you are good to do anything. Also having done both Clojure…

"Idk any package manager that bootstraps itself like this" Anaconda python's conda package manager can do the same.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#52

Post by cutler »

michaelmrose wrote: post #37
paulddraper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You "have to" deal with Java for Clojure about as much as you "have to" deal with C for Python, or C++ for Node.js. The implementation leaks for some dependencies, and it is easy to drop down into the lower language, but you can avoid knowing much about it.

Not understanding Java at all would seem to limit your choice of libraries, understanding of performance, and even usage of language features that directly rely on calling Java. In theory you could but your experience won't be optimal.

I've been using Clojure productively for years without ever having to import anything from Java.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#53

Post by cutler »

neilv wrote: post #17

Suggestions: 1. More requirements helps. What kinds of production-grade software? 2. For most purposes, you won't see the real benefits, compared to contemporary alternatives, until you have some experience with the Lisp. Enough experience that you realize that, although you can write in a Python or Ruby style in a Lisp, to some degree, there's other various idiomatic programming that's a bigger win sometimes. 3. Onc…

A good way to get Clojure into your contracting work is with polyglot solutions where Clojure, along with, say, Python sits behind a Node.js gateway. Combined in this way Clojure is always accompanied by 2 of the most popular languages - Javascript and Python.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#55

Post by iLemming »

spiralganglion wrote: post #13

I love Clojure, but I loathe Java, and I feel you do get exposed to a fair amount of Java stuff when trying to work in Clojure. It's far better than it used to be, but it's still too much for my liking. Since I build stuff for the web (and Electron, a bit), I use ClojureScript, and am generally really happy with it. It's all the goodness of Clojure — the lispiness, the killer persistent data structures, the wonderful…

> you do get exposed to a fair amount of Java stuff

Can you please expand on this? I've been using Clojure as my main PL for the past 3 years, and honestly only once I had to actually deal with some Java code (when I needed to figure out some Selenium stuff).

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#56

Post by cutler »

reagan wrote: post #8

Given your background, consider trying out hylang, which transpiles to Python and can use Python libraries. I played around with it a few times a couple years ago, but never developed a serious project due to limited tooling. The situation might have since improved. I've considered putting together an LSP server for it because it'd fun to use for personal projects and scripting.

Yes, another vote for Hy. Just wish they had some more manpower to take it to 1.0. Be aware of "let" in Hy, though, as it's been removed from the core and now lives in contrib. "let" is a major part of any Lisp IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#57

Post by cutler »

schpaencoder wrote: post #19
didibus wrote: post #15

Clojure most likely. Why don't you want to dig into the JVM, it's arguably the best production runtime out there. You could always try ClojureScript on Node.JS or even ClojureCLR. That said, I have to ask again why the hesitation to rely on the most battle tested most invested in runtime ever built, which is the JVM?

Was thinking the same thing. Seems people conflate java with the jvm. The jvm is almost as cool as the beam. Which got me thinking about the lfe, since we are in lisp land.

A lot of developers have reservations about the JVM due to the way it consumes available memory.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#59

Post by iLemming »

> building production grade software

IMO Clojure is the only viable choice today (that fits your requirements)

- Common Lisp (sadly) on the trajectory of becoming "Latin of Lisps". If you seriously into Lisps, at some point you'd probably would have to learn it, but practicality of that knowledge is slowly diminishing.

- Racket is still quite "academic", not much of it is used in the enterprise (in comparison).

- Erlang VM lisps are even less popular.

- There are a bunch of "smaller" lisps, like Fennel, but they are mostly used by solo enthusiasts, and not for driving businesses.

Clojure is really nice. Clojurescript is probably the best AltJS alternative today (compared to Elm, Purescript, ReasonML, Scalajs, Kotlinjs, GHCJS, etc.). Clojure is extremely stable. And don't worry about Java. There's no need to "dig into the Java world". There are tons of Clojure wrappers.

I think among FP languages Clojure is still the best choice today, because it is "worst is better of Haskell" * . Haskell is awesome, but: a) it is indisputably hard b) it's not a Lisp.

  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#60

Post by heinzemann »

I looked at Clojure back in 2010, and from from 2012 I've managed to work with it full time. Love it!

The only Java-esque thing you need to decipher are the potential stack traces. But that's becoming easier with each new release, and it's actually quite easy to find the Clojure-namespace (= file) and line number you need to focus on, just by scrolling through the usually not too long stack trace.

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