The Failure of Lisp? A Reply To Brandon Werner

Post by eru » Fri, Sep 19, 2008, 1:26 PM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #14

kylec wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I hear many people complaining about the "awkward" and "hard-to-read" syntax, it's rare to hear someone compliment the syntax of lisp. I am a big fan of the Lisp syntax because it's so simple and consistent - probably a relic of its roots in lambda calculus. Not having to worry about operator precedence is a huge bonus in itself - I don't know why on one hand people cling to PEMDAS, logic, assignment, etc havin…

You have an interesting point here that is not often discussed. I am pretty new to programming, which means that I'm not stuck in conventions about how code syntax is supposed to be. On this background I find lisp pretty easy exactly because the syntax is so simple. To me lisp is like chess: It's easy to grasp the basic rules, but hard to become a master.

Post by cia_plant » Fri, Sep 19, 2008, 1:40 PM UTC

jlouis wrote: post #26

brlewis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp will have played its major part when other languages have real macro systems.

Macros are a double edged sword. Their advantages also drags in some disadvantages. If they were only advantageous, they would have flown into mainstream languages long ago(in the full Lisp-sense where the macro is a lisp program). But they have not. This can be due to multiple reasons: their disadvantages outweigh the advantages or that the effort of getting them into the language simply drags so many other undesira…

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Sep 19, 2008, 3:11 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #20

kylec wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I hear many people complaining about the "awkward" and "hard-to-read" syntax, it's rare to hear someone compliment the syntax of lisp. I am a big fan of the Lisp syntax because it's so simple and consistent - probably a relic of its roots in lambda calculus. Not having to worry about operator precedence is a huge bonus in itself - I don't know why on one hand people cling to PEMDAS, logic, assignment, etc havin…

I agree. I wish ML used s-expressions. Also, you might like this presentation, "The Swine Before Perl" by Shriram Krishnamurthi (of PLT). It's a great thing to show people who wonder how you could think Lisp has a good syntax: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe... (Also: SK's book is great.)

Post by rkts » Fri, Sep 19, 2008, 5:06 PM UTC

blasdel wrote: post #22

brlewis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp will have played its major part when other languages have real macro systems.

Other languages don't necessarily need 'real macro systems' Lisp does, not just because it is so hopelessly low-level (for FP), but also because once you're using s-exprs it's hard to restrain anyone from mogrifying functions. In a suitable language like Haskell where all functions are composed, using functional composition for everything instead of low-level fiddling with "statements as data" makes a shit-ton of sen…

Post by prospero » Fri, Sep 19, 2008, 10:04 PM UTC

ced wrote: post #38

blasdel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bravo! People tend to boggle when I decry Lisp as being hopelessly low-level. Sometimes ambiguity can be free, allowing indifference to how the machine works, without obscuring it at all. A good example is classical Hindley-Milner type inference (the algorithm that adds type annotations to plain System F code): it is fairly easy to construct oddball statements where annotating the types is undecidable or would cause…

People tend to boggle when I decry Lisp as being hopelessly low-level. Intriguing. I'm not really convinced by your example though. In the spirit of conciseness is power[1], can you provide a short program that should be formally expressible in a good enough language, but isn't concisely in Lisp? Or maybe your definition of low-level is different from mine? [1] That's the PG version, of course.