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Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

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Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#101

Post by richardgreeko27 »

harry8 wrote: post #74

You want to learn programming. Lets get started - how long does that take to bang out 10 exercises? Order the estimated results from quickest to slowest. Here's my estimates (don't like them, show yours! It'll be interesting): - Scratch - python/perl/ruby/javascript - C/Java - Swift/Rust - Anything else running on the jvm - - a whole lot of daylight - - common lisp. And many if not most will fail to get to the first…

I think had I started with a lisp dialect like Racket and the book The Little Schemer, the speed of getting through those first exercises may have been just as fast or faster than the Ruby and JavaScript I started with.

Lisps are hard to switch to but I disagree that they're hard to start with.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#102

Post by jjav »

murderfs wrote: post #35
JohnFen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like RPN That's genuinely fascinating for me, because I find postfix notation to be more intuitive and easy to parse than infix notation.

It's definitely easier to parse programatically, but IMO it's a nightmare to read as a human. e.g. compare these expressions: (x+y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2 x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + + I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind.

> I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind.

You don't write out RPN in a long sequence like that. I'm a devoted RPN advocate and seeing "x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + +" is indeed difficult to parse. But that's not at all how you use RPN.

You compute the problem going from smaller units to larger units getting intermediate results as you go and combining them. You'd never write out the sequence as you did and try to follow it after the fact.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#103

Post by thaumasiotes »

o11c wrote: post #78
samatman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. There's no such thing as a python a-list, or p-list, and they can't share structure. There's overlap between programming in Python with lists, and programming in Lisp with lists, but not as much as it appears. In idiomatic Lisp, it's rather common to search a list for a value, cdr it, and cons that cdr to the collection you're building up. Python has nothing like that, because what I said makes no sense in t…

What do a-list/p-list have to do with sharing structure? If you want shared structure of lists in Python, use `itertools.chain`. If you want key-value mappings, use a dict. Order is preserved by default nowadays, and conversion to/from an iterable of 2-tuples is trivial.

> If you want shared structure of lists in Python, use `itertools.chain`.

That would involve zero shared structure. itertools.chain is just an iterator that iterates one iterable and then, instead of declaring that it's done, goes on to iterate another one.

Shared structure between lists means that two lists refer to some of the same regions of memory.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#104

Post by tangentstorm »

valty wrote: post #91
samatman wrote: post #7

It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…

It's funny that behind the scenes in all languages, everything is lists (in the AST). It's strange that we tend to initially code in easily readable built-in control structures (if, switch, for, while), but then there always comes a point when you need to refactor...and convert them into lists of data structures and process those. For example, if you are matching routes in a web server, you can write a bunch of if-st…

Yes but in whatever language you're imagining here, a "list" probably isn't the kind of list that lisp uses (linked lists of cons cells).

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#105

Post by m463 »

Karellen wrote: post #42
samatman wrote: post #7

It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…

> But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, Idiomatic python code uses lists extensively. In my (somewhat limited) experience, they're the default data structure to use for a lot of algorithms. Slightly more accurately, a lot of stuff in python uses sequences extensively, which are implemented by a number of types - but the default sequence is a list. And strings are lists. Yeah, if a list doe…

I like python significantly more than lisp.

There are so many ways to express yourself in python that are troublesome in lisp.

I actually think list manipulation is easier in python than lisp.

I don't know, is there a lisp dialect that makes common data structures available in a multitude of ways?

I seem to be able to manipulate lists quite easily in python, and switch back and forth to sets or hashes.

but in lisp you have to dig in to find (for example):

- how to prepend to a list

- how to append to a list

- how to remove an element from a lisp

- how to do slices of lists

it seems to me like a lot of operations in lisp are needlessly efficient too.

Like instead of copying a list, you have to modify the list in place.

if my list will only have 10 elements, and my machine does millions of instructions per second, can't I copy it around a few times if I want?

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#106

Post by siknad »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #2

Package management kind of sucks, the ecosystem sucks, other languages continually improve but nobody will ever advance the CL standard. There is nothing compelling about the language to people who aren't already Lisp people.

> There is nothing compelling about the language to people who aren't already Lisp people.

CL is expression based (like Rust, unlike other mainstream languages I've seen), has a concise macro system (more convenient than Rust's imo), has a GC (simpler to use than languages with manual memory management or RC-only), has a better developed ecosystem then some new languages (ex. automatic ffi generation; while buggy, tremendously helpful compared to writing bindings manually). And it's not pure as in Haskell. And it has type annotations that may be checked at runtime or improve performance. An implementation like SICL could make it viable to use it as a scripting language.

Any similar modern languages with better tooling/ecosystem? Perhaps Julia, haven't seen it yet.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#107

Post by jjav »

samatman wrote: post #7

It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…

I didn't see mentioned in the thread (maybe missed it) the #1 reason, IMO, that Lisp can't be popular in companies.

Everyone should take the time to learn Lisp and do a handful of personal projects with it. It'll help your growth as a software engineer. Just do it!

But that doesn't make it a great corporate language. Lips is infinitely flexible, you can mutate it to be what you want. That's cool and feels awesome.

Also: a maintenance nightmare as soon as you have more than ~1 person working on the codebase!

Everyone surely has heard the joke/truism how C++ can be great as long as you only use a sane subset. But every team uses a different subset. Now imagine something like Lisp where every developer & team morphs it in a different way and you have a product with hundreds of developers on it. Try maintaining that without going insane.

The anti-Lisp is something like Go. Simple, not very flexible, everyone does it the same way mostly, you can plug & play developers like scrum demands we do.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#108

Post by tonyarkles »

jjav wrote: post #102
murderfs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely easier to parse programatically, but IMO it's a nightmare to read as a human. e.g. compare these expressions: (x+y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2 x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + + I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind.

> I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind. You don't write out RPN in a long sequence like that. I'm a devoted RPN advocate and seeing "x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + +" is indeed difficult to parse. But that's not at all how you use RPN. You compute the problem going from smaller units to larger units getting intermediate results as you go and combining them.…

I went through EE using an HP 49G+ and continue to this day using RPN in Emacs calc-mode.

>> I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind.

> You compute the problem going from smaller units to larger units getting intermediate results as you go and combining them

That's totally it. I've tried doing infix/standard algebraic notation on a calculator and unless the screen is big enough to see all of your brackets you're almost certainly going to screw up one of the big terms in a fraction or something like that. I think a good different way of stating the "intermediate results" part is that instead of computing the solution from left to right you're computing the solution from the inside-out.

By far the most satisfying part of doing computation in RPN is that moment at the end when you've got a big stack full of intermediate results and you just do that "+ + + + +" to add them all up and bam! Answer!

Edit: I had two thoughts back-to-back after writing that.

First thought: I do actually struggle sometimes with doing math in Lisp because prefix notation isn't a way that I'm used to doing math. Which led to "Hmmm... what if you did Lisp but with postfix notation instead of prefix notation"

Second though: "Ohhh... that's Forth. And you don't need brackets at all..."

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#110

Post by agumonkey »

thot_experiment wrote: post #26
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the upfront mental cost debate is still going, a few people tried teachings lisps as first languages and people didn't struggle i personally cried a few tears when learning java, whereas the weird drscheme class made me all calm and happy programming also blends a few layers into one, and some people are operating at one (line by line modification of data), some want generic infinite freedom[0], you can rapidly see w…

Yeah that's fair, it also came naturally to me but anecdotally I've found a lot of people struggle with it, especially those who came up through a "get shit done first" type python or java pipeline in a traditional institution or bootcamp rather than having a true CS background.

python I understand, but get shit done and Java is not a given :p (partly joking, I understand the platform is industry grade)
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