51–60 of 174 posts
Better question: why not Lisp?
Can I be extremely shallow? Because the language feels like it's from the 60s. Like writing Fortran or Ada or Algol in 2021. C is timeless, it doesn't count. I love lisps, but Racket, for example, feels more modern than Common Lisp to me. And for shallow people like me, feel and ergonomics are very important when writing code.
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I cut my teeth on Lisp, but I've found that happiness comes from compile time guarantees. Maybe those two things aren't mutually exclusive, but a thoroughly robust type system seems like a big ask in such a dynamic language. None of the solutions I've encountered have satisfied me, but in fairness I haven't looked that hard.
I have 0 experience here but that's really surprising to me. I'd think out of any language lisp would shine here. You could write as complex of a type system as you wanted that compile time checks, so it's surprising someone hasn't written one that mimics at least java/c++/whatever style types. I do think that is one of the down sides to lisp though. When you can do almost anything it's very hard to agree on what to…
There's at least typed racket.
> I have 0 experience here but that's really surprising to me.
> I'd think out of any language lisp would shine here.
I don't think you should be surprised that people don't want to write their typecheckers as macros. A few people might want to do that, but most people don't. And at this point you're not far from just creating a new language, that you could create in ML or a descendant, which have always been one of the most popular options for that.
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> Finding solid libraries is tricky since it's not very popular professionally. If we're considering Clojure, then I would argue this point isn't true. Java interoperability in Clojure is really well supported and easy to accomplish, so leaning on the massive Java library ecosystem is possible. Also, anecdotally, a lot of Clojure libraries appear to be defunct, but just actually haven't been updated in so long becaus…
Well, if we're going to venture that far into excuse land Common Lisp has access to every C library in the world through CFFI. Look, I love Lisp, but reality isn't going anywhere.
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>> Finding solid libraries is tricky since it's not very popular professionally. > This one is so true it's not even funny I'd say that's a bit out of date as Quicklisp has made a huge difference for CL. Obviously it's still not the most library-rich ecosystem but it's come a very long way.
Do you mind elaborating a bit on this? I've actually never heard of Quicklisp.
It's a package manager for Common Lisp. It's supported in pretty much every implementation (probably every, but I won't say that with certainty).
What's a good Lisp dialect to write small programs in? I have some Emacs Lisp experience but I wouldn't use it to automate small tasks. For that, I typically use Python.
Better question: why not Lisp?
Can I be extremely shallow? Because the language feels like it's from the 60s. Like writing Fortran or Ada or Algol in 2021. C is timeless, it doesn't count. I love lisps, but Racket, for example, feels more modern than Common Lisp to me. And for shallow people like me, feel and ergonomics are very important when writing code.
Curious because I'm on the same boat.
I was annoyed for a while how ruby convention uses '?' characters at the end of method names that return a boolean.
I'm not even that old and I still want to yell `[a-zA-Z0-9_]+` identifier names or get off my lawn.
What's a good Lisp dialect to write small programs in? I have some Emacs Lisp experience but I wouldn't use it to automate small tasks. For that, I typically use Python.
Clojure is great if you don’t care about the startup time, as it has good emacs support, and you can fall back on the JVM ecosystem. It’s the most concise of all the lisps I have tried, but also a tad opinionated.
Better question: why not Lisp?
I cut my teeth on Lisp, but I've found that happiness comes from compile time guarantees. Maybe those two things aren't mutually exclusive, but a thoroughly robust type system seems like a big ask in such a dynamic language. None of the solutions I've encountered have satisfied me, but in fairness I haven't looked that hard.
Barring that, Julia is a lispy language with great support for optional typing.
Both of the above will get a potentially better performance when you add types (the checks are (mostly?) done at compile time). Racket also has optional types, but I think these contracts are checked at runtime? I am not sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I be extremely shallow? Because the language feels like it's from the 60s. Like writing Fortran or Ada or Algol in 2021. C is timeless, it doesn't count. I love lisps, but Racket, for example, feels more modern than Common Lisp to me. And for shallow people like me, feel and ergonomics are very important when writing code.
Could you elaborate a few specific points on this? Curious because I'm on the same boat. I was annoyed for a while how ruby convention uses '?' characters at the end of method names that return a boolean. I'm not even that old and I still want to yell `[a-zA-Z0-9_]+` identifier names or get off my lawn.