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I still Lisp (2021)

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Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#51

Post by packetlost »

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…

Lisp as a great tool for learning FP paradigms for application in other languages. IMO, in practice, the metaprogramming that Lisp encourages isn't very good good for the understandability of a codebase, which is IMO one of if not the most important factors for building an applications in a company.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#52

Post by rwilson4 »

owl57 wrote: post #21
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.

That's me! My primary language is python, but after that I write more elisp than anything else.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#53

Post by perihelions »

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…

SBCL strings store 4 bytes per character (the raw Unicode codepoints, like UTF-32). It's not ideal.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#54

Post by lilactown »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #31
robertfw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I tried Calva a lot and suggested it to my coworkers a while back (2017ish) and it was nothing but trouble. Cursive seemed to work pretty well, though.

AFAICT Calva has come a very long way in 5 years

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#55

Post by jimbokun »

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 reflects the beauty of the Emacs design, Taft something written decades ago is still being extended today to completely new use cases, because of the dynamic and flexible Lisp engine interacting with the C core.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#56

Post by jimbokun »

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.

“The tools for Lisp aren’t very good because I don’t use those tools.”

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#57

Post by kazinator »

packetlost wrote: post #51
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…

Lisp as a great tool for learning FP paradigms for application in other languages. IMO, in practice, the metaprogramming that Lisp encourages isn't very good good for the understandability of a codebase, which is IMO one of if not the most important factors for building an applications in a company .

The objective test for whether Lisp metaprogramming contributes to or detracts from the readability of a codebase is to take a sample of the code base and expand the macros, to see whether that is more or less readable.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#58

Post by lukego »

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…

Surely most Lisp hackers /are/ just writing Lisp code behind closed doors. Those 10 highly visible people are the rare exceptions.

I'm happy to hear more thoughts and notes like this from the silent majority.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#59

Post by treadmill »

carapace wrote: post #44
danuker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Lisp is so much better than pretty much every other programming language

>I don't even use it, despite having such a near-worshipful attitude towards it.

How do you know that it is so much better then?

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#60

Post by darthrupert »

throw009 wrote: post #48
danuker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also could be that autistic people such as yourself are such a small minority, that a programming language targetted for them won't ever have a large audience.
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