Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Lisp is Going to Save the World

landoflisp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 239 posts

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#31

Post by gnosis »

bitdiddle wrote: post #29
gnosis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more?" In a sense, people are using it more. A lot of features that Lisp pioneered and that used to be radical back in the day (like built-in garbage collection, lambdas, first-class functions, etc) have now been assimilated in to other languages. As a result, many Lispish things are now pretty mainstream. Not…

for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is. I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds

When I first learned Lisp, I quickly got to the point where I "don't even see the parenthesis". Shortly after that I learned to love them, and see them (and Lisp's simple syntax as a great strength).

Now extraneous syntax, even in a half-Lisp like Clojure, seems ugly to me. It's a real pity more people don't appreciate the elegant simplicity of Lisp (and especially Scheme).

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#32

Post by nightski »

larholm wrote: post #28
gnosis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons avoiding state is promoted is to make it easier to write robust software. State is too often the enemy of robustness.

And robustness is often the static plastic bubble that hides in itself, never accomplishing much in the real world. State is too often the real world. Mind you, I like robustness. It's like the cinder blocks I use to build my house, each robust and contained in itself. I just can't disregard state when stacking my cinder blocks on top of each other; the flexing and distribution of load is an emergent state that I hav…

So to be clear here I assume you are talking about mutable state. Even if that is the case, it is not about avoiding state at all. It is about managing it explicitly.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#33

Post by nickik »

david927 wrote: post #16

With the deepest reverence to John McCarthy, I regret to say that Lisp is our cosmological constant. It creates a static universe that is otherwise expanding; it reduces the problem to a solvable one and then declares victory. The truth is, it's all state. All of it. Remember that movie "Boy in the Plastic Bubble," about a boy with an immune system deficiency who lives instead a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble? T…

So because there is state you want to have a messy pile of it. Many lisps have more advanced system for states then most other languages.

Common Lisp has a better object system then any other in the world. Clojure has a time and state managment system.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#34

Post by akx »

deltasquared wrote: post #8
santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

Well if you want to use common lisp to make a web page, Conrad Barski(who drew the OP comic) has a guide here: http://lisperati.com/quick.html

Heads up - that's circa 2004.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#35

Post by Sandman »

DigitalJack wrote: post #25
jonahkagan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Noir is deprecated in favor of Compojure, according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027560 .

I was surprised to hear this, but it's true: http://blog.raynes.me/blog/2012/12/13/moving-away-from-noir/

Noir lives on through lib-noir [1]. I also suggest checking out Luminus [2].

[1] https://github.com/noir-clojure/lib-noir

[2] http://www.luminusweb.net/

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#36

Post by toolslive »

santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more?

I'm too pessimistic, but there is almost no correlation between quality and frequency as far as programming languages are concerned. Reasons for that are legio.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#38

Post by dschiptsov »

augustl wrote: post #30
david927 wrote: post #16

With the deepest reverence to John McCarthy, I regret to say that Lisp is our cosmological constant. It creates a static universe that is otherwise expanding; it reduces the problem to a solvable one and then declares victory. The truth is, it's all state. All of it. Remember that movie "Boy in the Plastic Bubble," about a boy with an immune system deficiency who lives instead a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble? T…

I attended TechMesh 2012 in London. The creators of Haskell were there, and there was a number of other Haskell talks. They were almost all about how to model state, I/O, etc. One of the Haskell creators also created Quickcheck, a generative testing tool where tests are written in Haskell. He talked about how he found state related bugs in Riak. Rich Hickey, author of Clojure, was there, he keynoted about state. I'd…

How to model a state is a meaningless question without asking state of what.

Same is true for I/O. You must start from a protocol.

Most of people probably underestimate how many brilliant people contribute to what we could call a modern Lisp.

With all respect, Clojure is nowhere near in terms of sanity, consistency and uniformity.

I don't event want to argue about Haskell. Seems like words "monad" is the same as words "chakra" or "dharma" in a popular culture.))

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#39

Post by lispm »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #11
santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more? * Weird syntax (for most people). * No free implementations existed during a key period (80s, 90s) so no initial traction, no useful libraries and killer apps which would pull the whole ecosystem. Implementations didnt even exist for commodity hardware. * The commercial implementations cost too much, so they suffocated the ecosystem. People preferred coding for free in C…

> No free implementations existed during a key period

BS.

CMUCL. AKCL. CLISP.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#40

Post by irahul »

dschiptsov wrote: post #38
augustl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I attended TechMesh 2012 in London. The creators of Haskell were there, and there was a number of other Haskell talks. They were almost all about how to model state, I/O, etc. One of the Haskell creators also created Quickcheck, a generative testing tool where tests are written in Haskell. He talked about how he found state related bugs in Riak. Rich Hickey, author of Clojure, was there, he keynoted about state. I'd…

How to model a state is a meaningless question without asking state of what. Same is true for I/O. You must start from a protocol. Most of people probably underestimate how many brilliant people contribute to what we could call a modern Lisp. With all respect, Clojure is nowhere near in terms of sanity, consistency and uniformity. I don't event want to argue about Haskell. Seems like words "monad" is the same as word…

> With all respect, Closure is nowhere near in terms of sanity, consistency and uniformity.

It's Clojure http://clojure.org/

Closure is Google's js library and tools https://developers.google.com/closure/

Post reply on HN