Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius" • Hacker News Board

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#41

Post by quasi » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 5:20 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #40

jfm3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'll be the first to admit that it comes off as trollish. It's just I see these pronouncements about a language that make claims, which frankly I don't think can be backed up. I like Lisp as a language. I really do. But to me that's not sufficient to annoint it a super language." The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. I will paraphrase three arguments: t…

The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. He was not only relaying an experience, as he cites the Lisp Curse. See: "I do believe in the Lisp curse that the power of the language is in some respects self-undermining because it empowers the individual and so tends to attract people who don't work well in teams." And I'm sure you've read the Lisp Curse. His ess…

Java is the best example of a not-so-great pudding being pulled along for over a decade (till it became better) just because of a large budget.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#42

Post by quasi » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 5:46 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #5

agentultra wrote: post #3

A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it. Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone? Lisp, like any suf…

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team pla…

I am sure there are other success stories which are not heard. At Cleartrip we had a largish team of Common Lisp programers. We became from new entrant to a number 2 position with software written in Common Lisp. So many myths about lisp were proven plain wrong. * you need to be brilliant to write lisp - none of us were "super" lisp programers with years of experience. We had common sense and nice simple code. * hard to learn lisp - not any more than, say, ruby. Out of the 10 odd lispers we had only 2 had CL exposure. The rest learned on the go. Whichever language / platform you use you have to train your team if they are fresh. * Lisp is slow - haha. * Lisp software is hard to run - haha again. we had months of uptime and we could patch our servers on the go. * Lispers are pricks - We were all normal people who worked together well. Lispers, Ruby guys, JS guys - all.

But still everything was not rosy. * When we started, documentation was a huge problem. We would never have got approved except for Edi, who's efforts were an inspiration and a basis of our stuff. * Library support was sparse. Now it is a lot better. But the community is small. Not that they are all pricks, but they are stretched too thin. If I have seen anything, if they use lisp for work, most of them have to fight daily battles against the anti-lisp crowd which will not look rationally at any good work you have done. * Library management - now much better because of quicklisp (thanks Zach) * For most people lack of a usual ORM and a MVC framework was unthinkable. CLSQL has been a pain point.

Programming in the Lisp environment, with the REPL, is a pleasure. I have had to do php after than and O-M-G - its horrible. All I will say to other fellow Lispers - The naysayers are always present. Trust your instinct. You will enjoy life better if you are able to love what you do.

(Cleartrip does not run on CL now. Java, I think. Because of reasons other than technical IMHO.)

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#43

Post by gchpaco » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 5:47 AM UTC

6ren wrote: post #36

lisper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much? Yes. But that is not a problem unique to Lisp. It's possible to write unreadable code in any language. And in general Lisp's introspection capabilities and macroexpand make it easier to reverse-engineer things that in other languages.

opps, I what you mean; I actually meant well-written lisp. Have you found that hard to understand, when it was heavily customized? I agree that tracing through complex code is taxing in any language; and it probably becomes much more important what concepts the author has chosen (and things like coupling/cohesion), than the language. i.e. That the problem wasn't that the code was badly written, but it was because the…

I have seen that happen before, but only when the domain was inherently complex. An example I actually committed; for a variety of reasons I needed a continuation driven LL(1) parser for my PhD thesis, and I needed it to be in Java. I wrote this as a Scheme program that output Java code. I tried hard to make things understandable (since I had to debug all of it!) but the Java code was basically incomprehensible and the Scheme program that generated it required some relatively sophisticated understandings of parser theory to understand the notation I was using.

A good theoretical example is: imagine trying to understand what a CPS driven compiler is doing with no understanding of CPS. That would be pretty hard in any language, and it's actually better in Lisp because you can express things closer to the theory.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#44

Post by cdavid » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 6:26 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #9

Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim: There are genius programmers who write Lisp, and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks would also be able to accomplish amazing things in other languages. Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case. Extraordinary deve…

It is dubious whether Linus would be more productive using LISP. I mean, git is based around the idea of being super close to the metal, with a consistant focus on speed. We are talking about people who say (and can reasonably claim !) that java is too slow because it does not support unsigned integers...

"being a genius programmer", whatever that means, is not a one dimension thing, and people can excel at some things while sucking at others: programming is very vast.

I don't know much about LISP, and have not data to believe (or not believe) the OP claim, but he is not alone in claiming that. For example, P. Norvig has also described how he was surprised that people could be as productive in C++ as in LISP when he arrived at google (I think it was in coders at work ? He made a slightly differente claim concerning the unimportance of language on HN as well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815).

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#45

Post by jfm3 » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 6:27 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #40

jfm3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'll be the first to admit that it comes off as trollish. It's just I see these pronouncements about a language that make claims, which frankly I don't think can be backed up. I like Lisp as a language. I really do. But to me that's not sufficient to annoint it a super language." The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. I will paraphrase three arguments: t…

The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. He was not only relaying an experience, as he cites the Lisp Curse. See: "I do believe in the Lisp curse that the power of the language is in some respects self-undermining because it empowers the individual and so tends to attract people who don't work well in teams." And I'm sure you've read the Lisp Curse. His ess…

"How do you explain C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, and PHP? None had very extensive marketing budgets."

I think a lot of these have larger marketing budgets than you imagine. I can't fathom the amount of money Microsoft spends promoting its C++ language tools, for example.

Regardless of whether languages other than Java become popular or not because of marketing, I still maintain that popularity and worthiness are not correlated. The majority of people may not eat cow dung, but they certainly don't eat really great pudding. They eat the same so-so pudding everyone else does, and most of them don't realize or don't care that it could be better. You will have nothing to "show" for coming up with a better pudding recipe unless you spend money on advertising, manufacturing, distribution, etc..

As for an example of worthiness, Lisp's advantages have been detailed one metric kerjillion times elsewhere. Macros, conditions, and the MOP are the usual suspects in the case of Common Lisp.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#46

Post by MrMan » Wed, Apr 27, 2011, 1:07 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #20

lisper wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the author assumes he's one of those geniuses Exactly the opposite actually. Not only do I not assume that, I specifically deny it.

Actually, even though you deny that you are a genius I think you are. I don't think your article refutes the original article by John Cook at all as you are one of the very small percentage of people that can "make things happen" in Lisp or any other language. I would suggest you are too much of an engineer to use an "inferior" tool like C++ or Java because you know there is something "better" otherwise I am sure you…

no genius would deny their own genius unless they were engaging in some strategy that required them to make this statement in pursuit of some higher-level goal. a genius who denies their own genius for any reason other than a strategic one cannot be a genius.

Re: Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

#47

Post by mistermann » Sat, Apr 30, 2011, 7:59 AM UTC

jfm3 wrote: post #45

kenjackson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. He was not only relaying an experience, as he cites the Lisp Curse. See: "I do believe in the Lisp curse that the power of the language is in some respects self-undermining because it empowers the individual and so tends to attract people who don't work well in teams." And I'm sure you've read the Lisp Curse. His ess…

"How do you explain C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, and PHP? None had very extensive marketing budgets." I think a lot of these have larger marketing budgets than you imagine. I can't fathom the amount of money Microsoft spends promoting its C++ language tools, for example. Regardless of whether languages other than Java become popular or not because of marketing, I still maintain that popularity and worthine…

I think his point was not "why is Lisp not popular", but if it is so powerful, why has it not become more mainstream based upon that? If a language is truly as powerful as its advocates assert, should it need a marketing budget? Ruby, via Ruby on Rails, is famous, and has been used on lots of highly visible (successful?) projects, with no traditional marketing budget.

I think he's asking, if Lisp is so awesome, why doesn't someone ever do something awesome with it? It seems like a fair question.