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A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

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Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#91

Post by xedrac »

arikrahman wrote: post #54
nobleach wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I particpated in a Clojure reading group for "Getting Clojure" back around 2017. Having the entire JVM ecosystem available, is absolutely a great benefit. I even fooled around with ClojureScript a bit. David Nolen is great at making the case for both.

Now there's Jank too, the first time a Lisp dialect has reached into native world since Clasp. The way it interops Clojure with the LLVM is unprecedented.

Don't forget Jolt! It's clojure built on top of Chez Scheme, which is super cool.

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#92

Post by patterns »

PaulHoule wrote: post #64

I'm going to take the opposite position that there is much less special about Lisp than people think. Like I have met so many programmers that travel around like itinerant martial artists looking for true functional programming and they never find it. To be specific, you can work all of the examples in Graham's On Lisp in Python except for one of the last chapters where he implements continuations that really need ma…

While I (think) understand the sentiment (ergonomics and practicality), it is still worth studying Lisp for a number of reasons. In particular, I would recommend to everyone to study Lisp 1.5 [1] to appreciate how an entire universe of programming languages can be bootstrapped with just a few primitives and equations.

It is true that, today, we have a vast array of impressive tools at our disposal, from parser combinators and generators, code generators to entire language workbenches with projectional editing capabilities. However, if one were to design a language for any reason, having a deep understanding of the expressiveness of computational models such as the lambda calculus would certainly be an "advantage" (especially for those who end up having to use the language): A Lisp/Scheme is as close to interactive lambda calculus as it gets. From there on, one can learn about implementing different evaluation strategies, scoping rules and continuations (William Byrd's "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [2] also to mind).

Now, I am not sure whether homoiconicity tends to lead people astray. It is true that is it not strictly necessary to make a language extensible (e.g., Smalltalk has no macros and is very extensible due to its powerful meta-object protocol and an elegant syntax for closures), but it's still worth studying the concept. For example, writing a metaintpreter in Prolog [3] is surprisingly easy because of its homoiconicity.

[1] https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/L...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc

[3] https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#93

Post by sph »

nobleach wrote: post #16

Since a few folks here recommended Common Lisp to me as the language that would "tick all my boxes", I've been doing a deep dive. Right now, I'm working through SICP again with DrRacket. The first time I worked through it with MIT Scheme MANY years ago. It's shocking how much I've forgotten. What I like about this article is that it walks through the different "camps" of Lisp. Scheme is so intriguing to me because of…

I dislike Common Lisp, and I fear it keeps ruining the reputation of Lisp itself with its archaic and obtuse systems designed by a committee of dinosaurs. This opinion will attract the ire of many a greybeard. I stand by it.

If you want a Scheme with batteries included, I recommend GNU Guile. Also worth your time are Racket, Clojure, Janet.

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#94

Post by zem »

pjmlp wrote: post #76
snorremd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Clojure dev (now just using Clojure in my spare time) I love Babashka. Michiel Borkent really nailed it with sci (Small Clojure Interpreter) and Babashka. Running a custom Clojure interpreter in a GraalVM compiled Clojure app is quite clever. Now there are of course limitations to what you can do in terms of not supporting Java reflection or the full Clojure compiler. But I've made some nifty small script…

I love the Clojure community, it is the only one that usually talks about the host platform in a symbiotic way, not as if they would be rewriting everything into their favourite language, like in most guest languages communities.

people don't usually think of C as a host platform, but the python community has a similarly symbiotic relationship with C extensions.

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#95

Post by sph »

iFire wrote: post #38

Since this is the largest gathering of LISP users I have seen, I have a question. Why prefer lisp-1 over lisp-2 or vice-versa?

Having a separate namespace for functions is silly in that it only saves you from a small set of variable shadowing problems. It’s a hack, not a serious solution.

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#96

Post by hackermailman »

nobleach wrote: post #16

Since a few folks here recommended Common Lisp to me as the language that would "tick all my boxes", I've been doing a deep dive. Right now, I'm working through SICP again with DrRacket. The first time I worked through it with MIT Scheme MANY years ago. It's shocking how much I've forgotten. What I like about this article is that it walks through the different "camps" of Lisp. Scheme is so intriguing to me because of…

In Sussman's book 'Software Design For Flexibility' he uses Match? in the pattern matching chapter to run on graphs. I think OCW archived his MIT course for the book too

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#97

Post by zem »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #56

The funny thing about Lisp is that writing a Lisp interpreter is significantly fewer keystrokes than correctly installing Common Lisp and its tooling. The ratio of lisps to lisp programmers may actually be above 1.

this is definitely true for forth (:

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#98

Post by nobleach »

hackermailman wrote: post #96
nobleach wrote: post #16

Since a few folks here recommended Common Lisp to me as the language that would "tick all my boxes", I've been doing a deep dive. Right now, I'm working through SICP again with DrRacket. The first time I worked through it with MIT Scheme MANY years ago. It's shocking how much I've forgotten. What I like about this article is that it walks through the different "camps" of Lisp. Scheme is so intriguing to me because of…

In Sussman's book 'Software Design For Flexibility' he uses Match? in the pattern matching chapter to run on graphs. I think OCW archived his MIT course for the book too

Yeah, guile has a library that looks close to what I want. The worry is that railway programming is an entire shift in error handling. Since it's not the standard that I've seen in the Lisp/Scheme world, I'd be forcing a paradigm that no one wants.

Re: A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

#99

Post by zem »

iFire wrote: post #38

Since this is the largest gathering of LISP users I have seen, I have a question. Why prefer lisp-1 over lisp-2 or vice-versa?

personal taste, for the most part. I like the thought of a single namespace, it fits my intuition from pretty much every other language out there, and I like how the code looks when I can pass functions around as though their names are regular variable bindings to an underlying function object.
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