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The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

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Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#71

Post by whartung »

ilc wrote: post #35
wglb wrote: post #11

Having programmed professionally in 36 languages, I must agree with this. I am having so much fun with Lisp, that I am not likely to go back. > Often developers say how you can make a mess of a Common Lisp codebase because of such freedom it provides. But isn’t that the same with any language? There is a story about the code behind the terminal interface for Tops-10 for the PDO-10. It had been tweaked over the years…

I wish you could use Genera. If you like emacs/slime. You would see how much we lost :(

But here's the thing, and I don't know, I never worked with Genera.

But.

Genera has been gone for over 30 years. At the time, it was certainly revolutionary. But in the computing world, where things move VERY fast, whatever made Genera amazing clearly wasn't amazing enough to replicate in full anywhere else.

I'm not even talking about other languages, trying to get that dynamic environment in modern languages, with modern tooling (which has made enormous strides over the years). But not even in the Lisp world has it resurfaced. Nobody is talking about how amazing Franz Lisp is, or LispWorks, both long running, successful Common Lisp implementations. Run by smart people, run by people "who were there".

We have Slime, with Emacs. We've had Slime forever. We've had solid Common Lisp implementations...forever! People still lament how good the Macintosh Lisp environment was (and honestly, I don't know how, or what made it more than what Slime might offer beyond nice access to the Mac toolbox).

Do you know what has changed in modern Common Lisp implementations since Genera? NOTHING! It's Common Lisp! Common Lisp is 30 years old, and a superset of whatever Lisp Genera was running. And you can't tell me that we don't have modern Genera because Flavors (Genera's object system) is so amazing and CLOS is lacking (because even if it was, it's Common Lisp -- you can FIX IT!, or simply implement Flavors because it's written in LISP!).

There are no secrets here.

Veterans speak of Genera in hushed tones. Sing songs about it. But, however good it was, it's, demonstrably, not good enough to do it again.

Meanwhile, there's been a dedicated pack of folks over at the Pharo side making Smalltalk even more Smalltalk with lots of new development tooling. These are folks that write Pharo so that they can make writing more Pharo even better. I swear, I think they're to the point that they just mount GIT as a file system now over there. I'm not a Smalltalk guy, but, boy, those folks have been riding a rocket for years.

So, it's not lost. It's abandoned. Left behind. For whatever reason. There's a difference.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#72

Post by adamc »

f1shy wrote: post #55
adamc wrote: post #2

I can relate. I read Graham's book on Common Lisp more than 20 years ago and was entranced. But opportunities to use it in the day job are few and far between, and I would have qualms about recommending it, in most contexts. For a lot of purposes, its libraries are just nowhere near as good as Python or JavaScript or Java. And some of its superpowers (macros!) can also be used really, really badly. There was an essay…

>>> There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" Boy! Nothing can be further from the truth! At least my experience, trying to teach people to program in java, c, c++, lisp and assembly to both technical and non technical people, the only language that is easy to teach is lisp. By far the only language that everybody “got” and could actually do something on it. Compare that to c++, where experien…

I think the essay had less to do with syntax than appreciating what makes lisp special. But sure. I love Lisp's ultra-simple syntax. And it makes macros work, which is indeed a superpower.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#73

Post by adamc »

felideon wrote: post #9
adamc wrote: post #2

I can relate. I read Graham's book on Common Lisp more than 20 years ago and was entranced. But opportunities to use it in the day job are few and far between, and I would have qualms about recommending it, in most contexts. For a lot of purposes, its libraries are just nowhere near as good as Python or JavaScript or Java. And some of its superpowers (macros!) can also be used really, really badly. There was an essay…

> There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" Presumably, you are referring to The Bipolar Lisp Programmer[1], an HN classic[2]. [1] https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bipolar+lisp+programmer

No, I was referring to this: https://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#74

Post by martinflack »

regularfry wrote: post #66

Am I the only one who just bounces off the ecosystem? I don't mean emacs/slime/sbcl, it's once you get beyond that. In my most recent foray I wanted to give roswell, qlot, and quicklisp a proper try, because I really want to find the Right Way to consume dependencies with proper version management. It's what I'm used to in just about every other context. But the version of qlot you get through roswell is old, nothing…

I play around with quicklisp to develop and tinker.

To test and deploy, I generally use Guix [0] to express a package for my application which pins dependencies to exact versions and optionally can run in a container. I have Guix installed on top of Ubuntu.

This is hobbyist and experimental work so it's not battle-tested.

[0] https://guix.gnu.org/

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#75

Post by nextos »

anthk wrote: post #54
taylodl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big piece of OO development is state management. If you're modeling a system having several interacting entities whose interactions may vary based off that entity's current state - then OO is most likely the way to go. You can encapsulate that state management in one place rather than having it strewn throughout the entire codebase. If you're doing information-oriented processing, whether it be a traditional batch…

CL can do OO programming too.

Common Lisp is one of the few truly multi-paradigm languages.

It's annoying the standard has not evolved a bit to bring some ideas you see in Clojure, or some computation models featured in CTM & Mozart/Oz that have made it to Racket.

Still, a fantastic language. And the ecosystem is far from stagnant, with things like https://clasp-developers.github.io and https://coalton-lang.github.io coming out lately.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#76

Post by pfdietz »

wglb wrote: post #11

Having programmed professionally in 36 languages, I must agree with this. I am having so much fun with Lisp, that I am not likely to go back. > Often developers say how you can make a mess of a Common Lisp codebase because of such freedom it provides. But isn’t that the same with any language? There is a story about the code behind the terminal interface for Tops-10 for the PDO-10. It had been tweaked over the years…

> It compiles itself in 2m15s.

My compile goes in about 1m18s. I do have it set to use multiple threads/cores.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#77

Post by tmtvl »

ivanlinux wrote: post #29

This is exactly why I exclusively write Perl, C, and Lisp, simply they are fun to write, and provide me with the capabilities to feel powerful as a developer. Most software written these days lands in languages that make me feel like a drone, endlessly fighting a system in place or a pattern for some arbitrary theoretical gain that is never realized in the real world anyways, OOP, Type-Systems, FP, whatever, why woul…

C, Perl, and Lisp? Amazing, it's like I'm looking into a mirror: those are the 3 languages I appreciate the most. The first time I tried coding something pseudo-practical in C (a simple program which counted the instances of every alphanumeric character in a text file) it ran so fast I had to do a double-take. Perl was the first language I decided to learn for fun and coming off Java it was nice not needing pages and pages of boilerplate to do simple stuff.

Common Lisp is very close to being my ideal language. It would be neat if I could do something like...

  (defstruct (Kons (:generic A D))
    (kar :type A)
    (kdr :type D))

  (deftype Lyst (&optional e)
    `(or Null
         (Kons ,(or e t)
               (Lyst ,e))))

  (deftype Character-Lyst ()
    '(Lyst Character))

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#78

Post by markc »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #8
netbioserror wrote: post #4

Lisp really is an eye-opening experience when learning to structure programs and computations. Stumbling on Lisp in college was a fascinating experience for me in particular because I had been raised around C++ and Java, and my programming life up to that point had been a struggle understanding how to abstract a program into objects and how to build those objects' interfaces. Once I started down the path of functiona…

> Maybe because it's easy to decouple data from operations on that data, even if stateful You can use objects in C++ and Java without mixing code and data (by having data-only and code-only classes for example). I haven't fully read it, but there's a book from a clojure developer about about this: https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming The book itself uses Java, not Clojure.

>The book itself uses Java, not Clojure.

Almost all of the code examples in the book are in JavaScript (not Java) though a significant feature of Sharvit's approach is that it decouples Data Oriented Programming from any specific language. As a Clojure geek, I highly recommend the book as the way to achieve some of Clojure's core virtues in other languages.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#79

Post by dannyobrien »

I'm a big fan of lisps, and haven't played sufficiently with rust to have an opinion -- but I will note that the benefits of a sophisticated type system is qualitatively different from, say, the statically-typed environment of C or Objective-C. The comparison I make when thinking about CL is something like Haskell or Elm, which /do/ have that feel of "if it compiles, it works". Without that, I do have the feeling of working without a safety-net that pushes against that sense of freedom that dynamically-typed languages like CL otherwise offer.

(Obligatory mention here of Coalton, which is an experiment in creating that sense of security within a CL paradigm: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton )

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#80

Post by allknowingfrog »

KerrAvon wrote: post #69
allknowingfrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been dabbling in Go recently, and I'm finding that the culture surrounding it is one of actually understanding what your code does. My main language is Ruby. It hits many of the same high notes that Lisp programmers talk about, and I enjoy writing it. There's just something about the practical, concrete nature of Go code that appeals to me.

Someone once wrote that "Ruby is an acceptable Lisp." Is Go your first static language? It's not a particularly good one except for certain niches. You might try some others.

It is, yeah. I've done tutorials in C and Rust and even Haskell at one time or another, but never anything serious. What do you recommend?
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