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I still Lisp (2021)

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Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#41

Post by User23 »

gaze wrote: post #9
sshine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would you recommend one starts? With Racket?

Every lisp variant is a bit different. Racket, Clojure, and Common Lisp are all excellent. Read a bit about the compromises and dip your toes in one and see if it sticks.

Racket has more didactic origins but I’m given to understand its a good albeit slow general purpose Lisp. Common Lisp is basically the kitchen sink programming language and with a good compiling implementation like SBCL it’s possible to write high performance code. Clojure is the Lisp that you’re most likely to get paid to write. It’s as performant as any JVM hosted language.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#42

Post by pxc »

convolvatron wrote: post #34
owl57 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

which is a terrible shame and a lesson. of the 10 or so lisp like languages i've used extensively, elisp is by far the worst. it succeeds because it interfaces with something important, and its carried along everywhere.

It's the lesson of JavaScript as well, famously.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#43

Post by ravi-delia »

danuker wrote: post #35
owl57 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> more Emacs Lisp being written recently Do you mean since hitting rock bottom in June 2021? https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...

Is this the best marker of Elisp being written? Perhaps I don't get what this is analyzing, but I suspect that it is the newcomers that write the least Elisp, and my impression is that packages are popping up and updating much quicker as of late

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#44

Post by carapace »

danuker wrote: post #36
throw009 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Rust, warmed over ideas form 40 years ago are just hard enough to make mediocrsties think they are cutting edge. >Can you expand on that? You generate code of other language than lisp in lisp? I write the real program in lisp in two weeks then translate it to a brain dead language over a few months so the average developer contribute to the code base. It's rather impossible to get people used to algol descendants…

I code in assembly in my mind. I just translate it to Lisp so others can understand it. (sarcasm over) If Lisp is so amazing, why does it not get more followers?

"If is so amazing, why doesn't everyone use it?" has got to be one of my least favorite questions. Never mind that it's lazy (in a bad way), it presupposes that people automatically adopt the best available technology or whatever, which is obviously false. But I think the thing that bothers me the most is that, asked with a different attitude and intent, it's usually a good question.

E.g. Lisp is so much better than pretty much every other programming language (except maybe APL) that it truly is bizarre and therefore interesting that it doesn't get wider adoption. (I don't even use it, despite having such a near-worshipful attitude towards it.)

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#45

Post by rosebay »

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…

[dead]

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#46

Post by nathants »

for clojure/jvm, there are a lot of good competitors and not an obvious winner.

for js/react, there is nothing even close to reagent/shadowcljs.

lisp is thriving on frontend, and doing just fine on backend.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#47

Post by signa11 »

nextos wrote: post #30
neilv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

   Clojure often leads the Stack Overflow survey in terms of salary.
wouldn't that also imply the classic demand and supply thingy ? the one that is alluded too in pg's articles...

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#48

Post by throw009 »

danuker wrote: post #36
throw009 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Rust, warmed over ideas form 40 years ago are just hard enough to make mediocrsties think they are cutting edge. >Can you expand on that? You generate code of other language than lisp in lisp? I write the real program in lisp in two weeks then translate it to a brain dead language over a few months so the average developer contribute to the code base. It's rather impossible to get people used to algol descendants…

I code in assembly in my mind. I just translate it to Lisp so others can understand it. (sarcasm over) If Lisp is so amazing, why does it not get more followers?

That you think assembly is fundamental rather than an accident of architecture really shows how undereducsted you are in computer science. Lisp isn't great because it's weird, it's great because it lucked into homoiconicity in its birth. It's weird because no other language family can do that.

It's not popular because the majority of programmers are mediocre and will never understand the point of homoiconicity.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#49

Post by throwawaysalome »

convolvatron wrote: post #34
owl57 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

which is a terrible shame and a lesson. of the 10 or so lisp like languages i've used extensively, elisp is by far the worst. it succeeds because it interfaces with something important, and its carried along everywhere.

which is a terrible shame and a lesson

What's the lesson? That a text editor's extension language needs the strong concurrency and immutability models of a Clojure or sbcl? Getting emacs to sit and roll over doesn't exactly require an industrial grade language.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#50

Post by erik_seaberg »

bsder wrote: post #25
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 st…

Lisp debuted powerful features (GC, lexical scope, closures, destructuring, reflection) back when they were still wildly expensive. Over the decades most of these filtered into everything we use. But I still haven’t seen any rivals for its convenience in providing domain-specific languages via macros.
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