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How Lisp is Going to Save the World

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Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#61

Post by cturner »

cgag wrote: post #50
cturner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more? My guess is that it's hard to create well-gelled lisp programming teams. If you're using Java or C#, there are certain ways of going about things, and there's general consensus about this. You can pick up Java code that is written by someone you've never met and have a pretty good idea of being able to work out what's going on. Something similar with python: whitespace fo…

I'm coming from a Clojure perspective (around a year of using it), so maybe some of this stuff is different with CL, but Clojure is incredibly simple compared to C++ and in my experience there's no problem with everyone simply using the entire language. I've read a decent amount of Clojure source, since documentation is admittedly a problem with a lot of libraries, but it's the language I've found actually easiest to…

The books I learnt lisp from emphasised recursion early, and were taught from a perspective of emphasising the power of the language and tricks available to programmers. This approach encourages arcana, similar to bit-shifting tricks you'd find in C books like _Hacker's Delight_ (Warren). Through lisp macros (present in Clojure), you can create your own sub-language.

So merely through the absence of this emphasis on expressive power, Clojure is a bit different. And I think that's great. I might be using Clojure at the moment, except I need to be able to make native builds for the project I'm working on, and so I went with Racket.

Yeah, people are weirded out by the syntax as well. Which is sad, because people who are used to it tend to love it. But if this was the only problem, it could have been easily bypassed decades ago with a whitespace alternative. That is, where developers would be able to denote blocks with python-style whitespace and colons as an alternative to parens. Last time I mentioned this someone pointed me to a distribution of arc that already did it.

    > many of the standard lib functions are themselves
    > written recursively
Maybe the JVM has been updated while I wasn't looking and no longer has a problem with deep recursion. What are some stdlib functions that are recursive?

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#62

Post by slurry »

dsafhkjsdh wrote: post #54

who write this crap? i wrote in lisp (scheme), this is the most bugged language i ever used. and i used more then 5. this is non debugable language, it it makes it bug full. you have to follow complex ideas, and keep scores of ideas, this is not for normal humans. when you pass the wrong type and not support it, it goes to hell, and as a programmer you start to flame. list, is a piece of shit for the masses, its usef…

I enjoy Lisp, but I got to agree with you about scheme debugging. MIT/GNU scheme has to be most unhelpful interpreter I've ever used. Error messages are loud, completely unhelpful, and by the end of it I was convinced the REPL was actively trying to make me feel stupid.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#63

Post by lispm »

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?

For many things you won't even know that it is written in some kind of Lisp.

* the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline. Plus it took care that the troops were at the right place.

* the missions of various Telescopes, especially the Hubble Space Telescope are planned with a Lisp-based planner

* American Express has been checking complex business card transactions with a Lisp-based rule system

* many cars (Ford, Jaguar, ...) were designed using a Lisp-based design software developed by Evans & Sutherland

* turbines for various airplanes were designed in Lisp (Boeing, Airbus, ...)

Some of that stuff survived. Some not.

But still today, if you see product descriptions like this, you would not suspect that it is written mainly in Lisp, but it is:

http://www.ptc.com/product/creo-elements-direct/modeling/

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#64

Post by PuercoPop »

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…

Ir you are talking about syntax uniformity, lisp is not very regular also http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html

Although I agree that clojure has is warts. For example clojurescript uses the numerical stack of JavaScript. So you get different and unexpected results than when running on the JVM

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#65

Post by slurry »

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…

Funny you should say that: just yesterday Reddit informed me that Lisp is 100% imperative because it has a loop keyword and allows destructive assignment.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#66

Post by spacemanaki »

slurry wrote: post #62
dsafhkjsdh wrote: post #54

who write this crap? i wrote in lisp (scheme), this is the most bugged language i ever used. and i used more then 5. this is non debugable language, it it makes it bug full. you have to follow complex ideas, and keep scores of ideas, this is not for normal humans. when you pass the wrong type and not support it, it goes to hell, and as a programmer you start to flame. list, is a piece of shit for the masses, its usef…

I enjoy Lisp, but I got to agree with you about scheme debugging. MIT/GNU scheme has to be most unhelpful interpreter I've ever used. Error messages are loud, completely unhelpful, and by the end of it I was convinced the REPL was actively trying to make me feel stupid.

Did you read the manual? http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-sch...

It's not as easy as setting breakpoints in an IDE like Eclipse and using a visual debugger there, but it's definitely a workable command-line debugger. You just need a little patience in order learn how to use it, and also probably have a pretty good understanding of Scheme's execution model, but that would be true for debugging any programming language.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#67

Post by spacemanaki »

mwexler wrote: post #41

Great intro. Any comments on "Land of Lisp" as a book for a "want to learn Lisp" journey?

If you enjoyed this little taste, you should get the book. It's really fun. There's a lot of code in it, and although it uses games as the subject for the examples, the code is definitely not fluff. It's been a year or two since I read it, but I recall that there's a bunch of graph traversal and search programs and even some low-level HTTP code.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#69

Post by pretoriusB »

lispm wrote: post #63
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?

For many things you won't even know that it is written in some kind of Lisp. * the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline. Plus it took care that the troops were at the right place. * the missions of various Telescopes, especially the Hubble Space Telescope are planned with a Lisp-based planner * American Express ha…

>the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline.

Really? Because IIRC it was won because it was fought by superpower against a small country with 1/1000 the military resources.

I'm not talking politics in this comment. What I mean to say is it's another thing to say "Lisp was used in that system" and totally another to say "the war was won because of it".

There is a big possibility that there was absolutely no correlation between what that language that system was written on and the war being won (and is far more likely, anyway: wars have been won, before and after, without Lisp).

Lot's of NASA missions use plain old C and do just fine. Should we say that they succeeded "because of" C?

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