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I still Lisp (2021)

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Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#61

Post by Hermitian909 »

signa11 wrote: post #47
nextos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My impression is that the high salary is because Clojure it is primarily used for small-ish, fairly senior, highly technical teams writing high impact standalone services e.g. it's my understanding that a Walmart's route planning teams writes their service in Clojure.

This actually meshes well with what you'd expect from a lisp being used well. Lisp's power and its downfall is that it lets you express abstraction at whatever skill level you're at with no built-in mechanisms to keep style consistent across large teams. This works really well for small teams of high powered developers.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#62

Post by fulafel »

nequo wrote: post #23
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?

AutoCAD uses it for scripting, might be a candidate.

Eg https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore...

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#63

Post by bmitc »

User23 wrote: post #41
gaze wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like Racket, but it is also a kitchen sink Scheme. It has a ton of features: GUI framework, drawing (although it's slow), event spaces, places, futures, OOP, mixins, traits, macros, #langs, etc. It can get quite complex very quickly. I have mainly used it as a Scheme.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#64

Post by [deleted] »

jfoutz wrote: post #15
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…

reddit. they switched to python for various reasons.

[deleted]

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#65

Post by winrid »

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…

Reading an 80mb JSON file in Node wouldn't be an issue either, so that's surprising.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#66

Post by throw009 »

darthrupert wrote: post #60
throw009 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Greatness is indeed reserved for the few.

I guess the masses can muddle through with rust or typescript.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#67

Post by fulafel »

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…

At least in Clojure's case, most dev teams are definitely just working on normal (domain-wise) business apps, leveraging existing stuff from the dev community, and not posting on the internet about it.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#68

Post by danuker »

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.

Show me homoiconicity used "for real". Sure, it's useful in compilers and interpreters, but how often do people need them in a business application? You will most likely use a library, and/or a syntax designed for serialization instead of programming, like JSON.

I personally vastly prefer Python's syntax over Lisp's, because the parentheses require two buttons pressed (shift + 9) instead of one (tab). That may sound trivial, but it's why I jump to Python instead of a Lisp.

That said, I do suffer from Python problems: the GIL, clunky immutable data structures like pyrsistent, poor support for shared memory for multithreading and so on.

Edit: I just realized in Lisp you could replace the built-in data structures if you wanted, so libraries like pyrsistent would require little change in client code syntax. I guess that's one example of homoiconicity in action.

Can you come up with another one? It is not very often that I find myself wanting to redefine the language I'm using (which comes with its risks: other coders and/or their tooling might find my code hard to follow).

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#69

Post by tmtvl »

I vehemently disagree with dynamically typed being a winning point of Lisp. SBCL's strong support for type checking is the main reason I was drawn from Scheme to CL, and Coalton (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton) is one of the most interesting Lisp projects I have encountered.

Type checking can remove an entire class of bugs from even being a consideration. Yes, it could be argued that type mismatches are a trivial class of bug, and yes, proper testing should catch any issues... but catching problems before you go to testing can save you precious seconds, especially when coding in the typical interactive style of Lisp. Lisp lets you code at amazingly high velocity, good support for type checking helps increase that velocity even further.

Re: I still Lisp (2021)

#70

Post by throw009 »

danuker wrote: post #68
throw009 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Show me homoiconicity used "for real". Sure, it's useful in compilers and interpreters, but how often do people need them in a business application? You will most likely use a library, and/or a syntax designed for serialization instead of programming, like JSON. I personally vastly prefer Python's syntax over Lisp's, because the parentheses require two buttons pressed (shift + 9) instead of one (tab). That may sound…

Running with the json example you don't need a json library in lisp because you'd just dump an s-expression holding the data you want directly. You don't need a library to parse it because it's already in a format that lisp can understand.

Hilariously enough the project that made me switch to lisp from python as my scripting language was writing a lightweight parser for ascii delimited files - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter?useskin=vector#ASCII... - instead of csv files. After doing it in both I had the eureka moment of using nested s-expressions in the scheme version instead of special characters. All of a sudden I had access to a csv like file which could be arbitrarily nested and didn't require me to worry about escaping. The next mind blowing moment was when I realized I could embed the code of the parser as the header of the format as the type definition and use it to evaluate the format with the program that was used to create it.

You don't even need some deep insanity to do it just:

    (eval `(,(car ls) (cadr ls)) (interaction-environment))
It also shows why I wouldn't use lisp for everything: if I wanted to ingest a file of a known csv dialect that won't fit in memory I'd do it in C after doing the prototype/master version in lisp. I also wouldn't trust running unverified source code from the internet. But for internal projects it's better than sliced bread.
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