Why Lisp? (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Lisp? (2015)

#171

Post by theodorethomas » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #102

spicybright wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Julia, the convention is that a function like "swap!" modifies its input. It's extremely handy. Also, "odd?" is just an elegant way to name a predicate.

I saw that convention in IBM/NAG's Scratchpad/Axiom computer algebra system which was designed in the 80s. It may go further back than that.

Re: Why Lisp? (2015)

#172

Post by zascrash » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #137

medo-bear wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you still use lisp ? i noticed a while ago you were working on a cryptographic project and i am sure you considered common lisp for this, but didn't pick it. is there a reason for this ?

Yes. In fact, I do almost all of my coding in Common Lisp. I'm even getting paid for some of it :-) I'm working part time for Intel helping them maintain an internal design tool written in CL. I run my own email server that runs a spam filter that I wrote in CL, and the e-commerce system that processes orders for my crypto dongle is written in CL. As an exercise I wrote a sudoku solver in CL a while back.

sorry to ask, but what about that cryptographic project? why didn't you pick CL?

Re: Why Lisp? (2015)

#173

Post by lisper » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

zascrash wrote: post #172

lisper wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In fact, I do almost all of my coding in Common Lisp. I'm even getting paid for some of it :-) I'm working part time for Intel helping them maintain an internal design tool written in CL. I run my own email server that runs a spam filter that I wrote in CL, and the e-commerce system that processes orders for my crypto dongle is written in CL. As an exercise I wrote a sudoku solver in CL a while back.

sorry to ask, but what about that cryptographic project? why didn't you pick CL?

Because that product was an embedded system running on a very small SoC. It only had 1MB of flash and 192k of SRAM. It's theoretically possible to run CL on a system that small -- Coral Common Lisp ran on a Mac Plus with 1MB of RAM back in the 1980s -- but nothing off-the-shelf will do that today.

(I did, however, put a little Scheme interpreter on it as an easter egg :-)

I do have some CL code that supports the crypto project. The back-end for this:

https://stage.sc4.us/sc4/sc4tk.html

is written in CL (though all the actual encryption is done client-side in Javascript). I also have some prototype crypto code that I don't really use for anything, including this double-ratchet implementation:

https://github.com/rongarret/tweetnacl/blob/master/ratchet.l...

and some elliptic curve code:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/djbec.lisp

Re: Why Lisp? (2015)

#174

Post by dreamcompiler » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

gaze wrote: post #69

Why does it feel like there’s more prose about lisp being written than lisp code? I swear there’s like 15 people writing Common Lisp — Nikodemus, Shirakumo, Stylewarning, Christian Schafmeister, Borodust, the ITA folks, and maybe 2 startups.

Here are over 16k repositories. They're certainly not all by 15 people.

https://github.com/search?q=language%3A%22Common+Lisp%22&typ...