111–120 of 322 posts
The website seems to have a bug with syntax highlighting. Pieces of code included in the post text are black, you can still see the actual text if you select it with your mouse. Same bug on Chrome desktop and on Safari on iPad
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big thing is that Lisp is (aside from mutable variable assignment) basically all declarative, rather than the imperative paradigm. Even without static types, and even allowing macro craziness, there's just such a stronger baseline of declarative and functional thinking, you're off to such a good start in clearer thinking and reasoning about a program.
I think this depends on the Lisp, no? AFAIK Common Lisp supports a lot of imperative style programming--besides all the mutation/assignment functions, there's the `prog` macro that lets you use goto, `do`/`do*` to iterate over groups of statements, or even the `loop` macro. OTOH the Scheme-style Lisps are much more declarative thanks to TCO and a community that prefers the functional/declarative programming style. Bu…
I would argue that it's very much not just semantics, or at the very least it's certainly not petty. The distinction has a noticeable effect on what the experience of writing code and on the reliability and related properties of the written code.
Programming is in tension between the Light Side and the Dark Side. The Light Side is about preventing the programmer from making mistakes: Get rid of go-tos! Add static types! Do not allow a bug to be expressible. The Dark Side is about giving power to the programmer: Macros? Obviously. Operator overloading? Self-modifying code? Multi-line reg-exps? Go to town! The Light Side knows programmers are flawed and imposes…
for a while there's been a strong cultural tendency in programming to mistrust people and trust tools (often even blindly because tools are just assumed to make no mistakes), and so expressiveness has been sacrificed for safety. There can be something to this but it's also self-fulfilling, if you strip people of agency of course they'll unlearn to program. I've always thought it's a misanthropic philosophy and sucked…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't nearly as much of a trade-off as people say. Languages like Haskell are both remarkably expressive and provide a lot of safety. (And, of course, languages like Python, Java and Go are the opposite.)
Haskell is currently at #18 in LangPop: https://langpop.com/rankings Almost by definition that implies that it makes some trade-offs that turn off lots of programmers. Still more popular than Lisp, though.
The website seems to have a bug with syntax highlighting. Pieces of code included in the post text are black, you can still see the actual text if you select it with your mouse. Same bug on Chrome desktop and on Safari on iPad
MacOS Chrome? The code blocks look fine to me in linux {firefox, chromium, brave}. I think they're all using Qt.
Programming is in tension between the Light Side and the Dark Side. The Light Side is about preventing the programmer from making mistakes: Get rid of go-tos! Add static types! Do not allow a bug to be expressible. The Dark Side is about giving power to the programmer: Macros? Obviously. Operator overloading? Self-modifying code? Multi-line reg-exps? Go to town! The Light Side knows programmers are flawed and imposes…
Programming is in tension between the Light Side and the Dark Side. The Light Side is about preventing the programmer from making mistakes: Get rid of go-tos! Add static types! Do not allow a bug to be expressible. The Dark Side is about giving power to the programmer: Macros? Obviously. Operator overloading? Self-modifying code? Multi-line reg-exps? Go to town! The Light Side knows programmers are flawed and imposes…
I think the big thing is that Lisp is (aside from mutable variable assignment) basically all declarative, rather than the imperative paradigm. Even without static types, and even allowing macro craziness, there's just such a stronger baseline of declarative and functional thinking, you're off to such a good start in clearer thinking and reasoning about a program.
There are prologs, constraint solvers, ffis, JavaScript alternatives, garbage collected and not garbage collected languages that call themselves lisps.
I played a little bit around with LISP but I was astounded when I saw that you run programs using the live REPL. I thought, how can you reliably deploy a finished program if it can get messed with at any time? Why isn't there a way to compile to a binary?
That's one way, you stopped too early in your investigation though.
You can produce binaries, though the precise mechanism will vary by your implementation. And there's no reason to use the REPL for it. You can create an executable file with something like this:
(defun main () ...) ; do whatever you need in here for program launch
(sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "my-program" :executable t :toplevel #'main)
Or, if you don't need a binary, you can have something like this:
(defun main () ...)
(main)
(NB: Using a function named main isn't strictly necessary, I named it that for the example. Name it whatever you want.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't nearly as much of a trade-off as people say. Languages like Haskell are both remarkably expressive and provide a lot of safety. (And, of course, languages like Python, Java and Go are the opposite.)
Haskell is currently at #18 in LangPop: https://langpop.com/rankings Almost by definition that implies that it makes some trade-offs that turn off lots of programmers. Still more popular than Lisp, though.