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I still Lisp (2021)

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Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#11

Post by throw009 »

floren wrote: post #10
gaze wrote: post #2

I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…

I think Lisp has a sort of cachet to it, "lost secret of the ancients scorned by foolish mortals," that draws a lot of people to talk about it endlessly and speculate about how important it is instead of just... using it. I used to see the same thing in the Plan 9 community where people loved to post on the mailing list about all their grand plans for doing stuff with Plan 9, but they never even installed the goddamn…

Lisp is a research language that lucked into great syntax by accident. I use it all the time to help me think through a problem and then implement it in something brain dead like rust so the average programmer can follow along.

From the outside my code bases look 0% lisp, from the inside they are 100% lisp with build artifacts in other languages.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#12

Post by armitron »

floren wrote: post #8

I've been digging into Common Lisp again lately. I'm really enjoying some parts: CLIM is weird but interesting, and the fact that I'm basically developing inside a debugger makes testing and iterating on stuff pretty straightforward. On the other hand, library documentation frequently feels more like the programmer was making notes to himself rather than illustrating how the code might actually be used. I was also pr…

Lisp won't save you from yourself. I bet a Go program using an equivalent representation (assumption being you naively used READ) would exhibit similar memory consumption. However, that doesn't mean that you don't have other options:

- Use an array

- Load the entire file in a memory buffer and skip the reader

- Use mmap (for extra points, you can keep the entire file outside the Lisp heap but still manipulate it in Lisp)

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#13

Post by neilv »

gaze wrote: post #2

I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…

(I've done a lot of Lisp, for money, and for open source platform&community buildout.)

HN articles about exotic things, not just Lisp, do seem to get upvoted disproportionately.

Also, PG declared Lisp as something you're supposed to think is important or a superpower, and I've wondered whether that also contributes to some upvotes on HN.

But I'm not aware that a single one of the bajillion YC startups used Lisp.

Maybe it's like an admirable religious dogma that a congregation affirms each weekend, and then promptly forgets about for the rest of the week.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#14

Post by askonomm »

Been doing Clojure for the past 5 years and while the language itself is great, the ecosystem really isn't. The tooling is subpar, editor support is clunky at best, everything is for some odd reason much harder to set up and explained in a more difficult way. A ton of libraries don't even provide documentation, they just expect you to REPL their functions to find out what they do.

The older I get the more I realize that what makes something great to use isn't all about the language, but the surrounding environment, and how pleasant _that_ is to use. Personally I think I will most likely not Lisp for much longer because I'm seeing many other languages have much nicer to use ecosystems, even if they probably pay less.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#15

Post by jfoutz »

neilv wrote: post #13
gaze wrote: post #2

I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…

(I've done a lot of Lisp, for money, and for open source platform&community buildout.) HN articles about exotic things, not just Lisp, do seem to get upvoted disproportionately. Also, PG declared Lisp as something you're supposed to think is important or a superpower, and I've wondered whether that also contributes to some upvotes on HN. But I'm not aware that a single one of the bajillion YC startups used Lisp. Mayb…

reddit.

they switched to python for various reasons.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#16

Post by Keyframe »

sshine wrote: post #5
gaze wrote: post #2

I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…

Where would you recommend one starts? With Racket?

Yeah, scheme will do. Racket especially since it has all things to get you started. Once comfortable, try dipping into proper CL like SBCL and then decide on a small self-designed project with a clear goal in mind. That way you'll see the struggles or lack of.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#17

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

askonomm wrote: post #14

Been doing Clojure for the past 5 years and while the language itself is great, the ecosystem really isn't. The tooling is subpar, editor support is clunky at best, everything is for some odd reason much harder to set up and explained in a more difficult way. A ton of libraries don't even provide documentation, they just expect you to REPL their functions to find out what they do. The older I get the more I realize t…

This is the opposite of my experience: one of the main reasons I prefer to use Common Lisp and Clojure over any other language is that the tooling is so much better (emacs + SLIME [CL] or Cider [Clojure]). The only real competitors, imo, are SmallTalk and Prolog environments. However, part of this is the paradigm is completely different and it took me a bit of time to learn what made the tooling great.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#18

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

floren wrote: post #8

I've been digging into Common Lisp again lately. I'm really enjoying some parts: CLIM is weird but interesting, and the fact that I'm basically developing inside a debugger makes testing and iterating on stuff pretty straightforward. On the other hand, library documentation frequently feels more like the programmer was making notes to himself rather than illustrating how the code might actually be used. I was also pr…

You can run into similar issues in the JVM if `-Xmx#` is too small. This has to do with the way sbcl’s decided to manage the heap and other implementations won’t have this issue. But, I typically start sbcl with an 8GB heap and basically never run into this when consuming large files.

But, also, once you hit a couple megabytes or so, it’s almost always better IMO to consume a file incrementally rather than all at once.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#19

Post by askonomm »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #17
askonomm wrote: post #14

Been doing Clojure for the past 5 years and while the language itself is great, the ecosystem really isn't. The tooling is subpar, editor support is clunky at best, everything is for some odd reason much harder to set up and explained in a more difficult way. A ton of libraries don't even provide documentation, they just expect you to REPL their functions to find out what they do. The older I get the more I realize t…

This is the opposite of my experience: one of the main reasons I prefer to use Common Lisp and Clojure over any other language is that the tooling is so much better (emacs + SLIME [CL] or Cider [Clojure]). The only real competitors, imo, are SmallTalk and Prolog environments. However, part of this is the paradigm is completely different and it took me a bit of time to learn what made the tooling great.

Yeah, for Emacs users I'm sure Clojure is great. For the other 99% of us who use VS Code or IntelliJ or something else entirely, it really isn't. Though IntelliJ + Cursive I'd say is probably the best, it still pales in comparison to say Rust or TypeScript support in editors.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#20

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

sshine wrote: post #7
MrLeap wrote: post #3

I haven't used a lisp for a few years, but I still remember after it finally "clicked" the weird _velocity_. Code just flooded out. In other languages I hop around from class defs to class defs, different files. Just richocheting all over the file system. Something about LISP removes a lot of the ricochet. It's a weird sensation.

I didn’t do a lot of Lisp, but I remember solving Project Euler in Scheme and encountering a dynamic programming problem and finding it extremely easy and natural to write a memoize macro with very little language experience.

QUOTE makes so many things trivial that are straight up ugly in other languages.
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