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I still Lisp (2021)

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Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#21

Post by owl57 »

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 feel like there may be more Emacs Lisp being written recently than other Lisps and prose about Lisp combined.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#22

Post by grugagag »

throw009 wrote: post #11
floren wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Is Rust brain dead language anyone can follow along? Did you mean python?

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

Can you expand on that? You generate code of other language than lisp in lisp?

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#23

Post by nequo »

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 wonder what dialect of Lisp is the most widely deployed and most widely written. Maybe Clojure, or Emacs Lisp?

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#24

Post by eyelidlessness »

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 haven’t written any kind of lisp for years, though I used to do so professionally (Clojure) and have been moderately successful getting some reusable stuff open sourced in that context (every time I look back at the “biggest” of these contributions it’s always amusing because it was not much more than a relatively simple macro).

I’d love to write more lisp, and like the article author I’m drawn to Racket, but I’ve just got very little bandwidth for exploring it further. Even so, lisp generally is something I advocate learning especially to mentees, because learning it (in author’s sense pretty much exactly as expressed, but with no strong feelings towards static typing at the time) was so transformative for me. I don’t need to write lisp to reap most of its benefits now… I write code in whatever language with the same attitude the author describes: mostly operate on values, abstract and isolate mutations with particularly high value, enjoy reasoning about code easily. And I’d add: recognize things which are like sexprs for what they are as things you can treat like sexprs because that’s more or less what they are.

Granted I’m not posting anything to HN, front page or otherwise besides comments. But I’m still inclined to praise lisp even a few years out from the last time I actually wrote any. Because it’s bound to be as foundational for others as it has been for me.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#25

Post by bsder »

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…

Lisp was probably the first widely available language to use garbage collection as well as generate an ecosystem.

As such, it damn near was a superpower compared to everything else available at the time in about 1984--think Assembly, C, Pascal, etc. Garbage collection meant that all the effort everybody else spent on memory management could be spent on your problem. And the ecosystem meant that you had actual data structures to work with right in the language library instead of having to build those from scratch every time.

Emphasis on WAS. Right at about 1988, the new languages demonstrated that everybody got the message.

Perl, Tcl, Python, etc. all had garbage collection and worked very hard to create a general ecosystem. This roughly negated the advantages that Lisp had.

At that point, anybody really well versed in Perl, Tcl, Python, etc. was equally as productive as if they were writing in a Lisp.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#26

Post by robertfw »

askonomm wrote: post #19
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've found Calva for VS Code to be excellent, what do you think is missing there?

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#27

Post by shriphani »

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…

I love clojure but do a lot more Rust now. I feel the language leadership is from the information-systems universe - thinking about databases, schemas that sort of thing - and I feel the language and tooling are very good for those sorts of things but there is really no energy or interest in expanding beyond those use cases so it feels like things are settled now and wont change.

Rust OTOH feels highly malleable and the tooling is always improving. The community seems to care about a good user experience across several domains - web, systems, networking, cryptography, desktop gui, and over the last 2 - 3 things are really coming together as coherent whole.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#28

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#29

Post by phforms »

askonomm wrote: post #19
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried Calva for VS Code? Although I don’t use it myself (I use vim-iced with Neovim, which I like very much), I have heard lots of good things about it and it seems very easy to set up and use.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#30

Post by nextos »

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…

As a counterexample, Clojure is pretty popular in some niches.

I have received offers this year to join well-funded startups using Clojure.

Datomic is great for some usecases. Clojure often leads the Stack Overflow survey in terms of salary.

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