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A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

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Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#121

Post by jake_and_fatman »

GMoromisato wrote: post #95
frwrfwrfeefwf wrote: post #88

[dead]

Of course you feel this way. You just finished reading SICP or maybe you binged PG essays last weekend. But eventually you'll read Simon Peyton Jones and start screaming about functional programming and algebraic type systems. Then, if you're lucky, you'll get a real job and realize that languages are just a tiny part of software engineering. I'm excited for you to experience that journey.

I see what you did there.

"Of course that's your contention. You just got finished readin' some Marxian historian -- Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when you get to James Lemon, and then you're gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." Good Will Hunting (1997)

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#122

Post by tyeaglet »

GMoromisato wrote: post #22

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…

Only if you knew the power of the Lisp side…

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#125

Post by skydhash »

coliveira wrote: post #113
Barrin92 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue is also social, the average software engineer will treat Lisp code as a liability because most people really don't know what to do with it. In the mind of a professional SE, code is "maintainable" only if it's writing in Javascript or some other commercial language.

Yep, you have to use C# and Java because they are safe. If you want anything extra, you need to use $library, because only $library's maintainer is trusted with the dark corners of the language. Look how powerful we are, millions of libraries. Look at those Lisp guys and their sorry examples of package managers. /s

If there's one thing I've been happy with learning Common Lisp and Clojure is that you only want libraries for things like algorithms, data formats, and protocols/interfaces. Mostly because those often have standards. Anything else should be a snippet to copypaste even when presented as a full program.

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#126

Post by James_K »

GMoromisato wrote: post #22

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 dislike when people use the term “power” to describe making code slightly shorter to type. Operator overloading is not in any meaningful sense more powerful than a language which lacks it.

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#127

Post by criddell »

I’m guessing there’s some way for a Lisp program to load a DLL and call a function in it so writing a Windows application using the Windows App SDK is likely possible.

The one part I can’t imagine is how do you pass a Lisp function as a callback?

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#128

Post by rmunn »

criddell wrote: post #127

I’m guessing there’s some way for a Lisp program to load a DLL and call a function in it so writing a Windows application using the Windows App SDK is likely possible. The one part I can’t imagine is how do you pass a Lisp function as a callback?

https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/cffi/doc/Tuto... has some pointers (which might be harder to understand unless you have read the rest of https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/cffi/doc/Tuto... first). The short version (which I might be mangling in my attempt to shorten it) is, since Lisp is so very good at creating code, you have your Lisp program create a C function that will be passed as the callback to the API. Then the C function that you created will convert the C data structures to Lisp data structures, and call the Lisp function with those Lisp data structures.

If you're really good at Lisp, you can write that automatic-callback-creation function yourself. But if you're really, really good at Lisp, you will just use one of the ones that other people have already written, e.g. `define-alien-callable` from https://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Calling-Lisp-From-C or some other similar FFI.

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#129

Post by rmunn »

tmtvl wrote: post #87
lenkite wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Standardized Concurrency is basic table-stakes for a language today. CL does not have a standardized async/await or concurrency model. The standard hasn't been updated since 1995 so it will never happen.

> The standard hasn't been updated since 1995 The latest finalised submission to the Common Lisp Document Repository (confusingly called CDR instead of CLDR) dates from August 4, 2013. CDRs are the equivalent to the SRFIs from the Scheme world. You could argue that they are not THE standard, but they are A standard. And considering the original standardization supposedly cost 400,000 USD (about 900,000 USD in today's…

Since my job involves a lot of Unicode stuff, I personally would have been confused if it had been called the CLDR, thinking that it was referring the Common Locale Data Repository. (I have to look something up in the CLDR about once a month on average).

And since the Common Lisp Document Repository appears to have been created in 2006 (the first document at https://cdr.common-lisp.dev/index_files/final.html is a description of the rationale for its existence, dated August 2006) while the Common Locale Data Repository was created in 2003, the Common Locale Data Repository had the CLDR acronym first. So kudos to the Common Lisp Document Repository folks for not overloading the acronym but finding an alternative.

Re: A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

#130

Post by rmunn »

lenkite wrote: post #75
abetusk wrote: post #32

There are many articles extolling the virtues of Lisp. I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Articles like this, and the PG articles it references, amount to "if you know, you know". I understand the appeal and I understand the explicit and implicit arguments this article is making. Computer programming has m…

> I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Standardized Concurrency is basic table-stakes for a language today. CL does not have a standardized async/await or concurrency model. The standard hasn't been updated since 1995 so it will never happen.

https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl lists some concurrency packages, such as https://github.com/sionescu/bordeaux-threads and https://github.com/sharplispers/lparallel, as being "so widespread and solid that they became community standards. You can't be wrong with them." I don't know enough to know whether or not they're right about those being widespread, but if that list is wrong then I'm sure someone will chime in to say so.

So while the official standard may not have concurrency, that does not mean that there isn't a de facto community standard way to do it.

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