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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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

cturner wrote: post #61
cgag wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#82

Post by gajomi »

david927 wrote: post #76
dasil003 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but what you're saying is immediately obvious. No one in the functional programming world is laboring under the impression that state doesn't exist. The real issue is whether you think it's worth separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion from stateful code that has to deal with mutating concerns. Functional programming is where research on improving abstractions to better allo…

I'm not sure what I said is obvious because you seem to have missed my point. I didn't say that "state exists". I said, "It's all state." I'm saying the notion of "separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion," while a successful strategy in the past, is inherently crippled by that division.

For the record, I also did not think whatever you were saying was obvious, but if your point is that understanding programs by "separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion" is no longer a viable strategy, I must take issue with your statement. Can you provide an example of a side effect free function that can't be reasoned about mathematically? I'm sure they exist, but they seem to me to be a kind of exotic beast. Or maybe I am just not familiar with your domain of expertise?

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#83

Post by king_magic »

S4M wrote: post #77

I fail to see how this is going to convince anybody who hasn't tried lisp to give it a shot. This cartoon can be summarised as "All languages are accumulating bugs while lisp has some magic X and Y that provide a way around them." A blub user will think "yeah whatever", IMHO.

My thoughts exactly, but I'd add this: I love and respect Lisp; I've written my fair share of it. There is absolutely nothing inherently magical in Lisp that prevent you from introducing bugs. You can just as easily make a logic error in your code that results in a bug. Bugs happen. Bugs will happen. There is no silver bullet. The only way to reduce bugs is to test thoroughly.

tl;dr: nice cartoon, "lisp means no bugs" == total BS, bugs can totally exist in Lisp code

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#84

Post by efuquen »

david927 wrote: post #76
dasil003 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but what you're saying is immediately obvious. No one in the functional programming world is laboring under the impression that state doesn't exist. The real issue is whether you think it's worth separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion from stateful code that has to deal with mutating concerns. Functional programming is where research on improving abstractions to better allo…

I'm not sure what I said is obvious because you seem to have missed my point. I didn't say that "state exists". I said, "It's all state." I'm saying the notion of "separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion," while a successful strategy in the past, is inherently crippled by that division.

How it exactly is it a "crippled vision"? There are tons and tons of code that I write every day that I'm able to separate out like this. Honestly there is way more code that you can reason about in this way then not reason about in this way. This isn't some academic exercise, people right functional code that operate in this way and do a lot of useful things everyday.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#85

Post by martinced »

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…

"The truth is, it's all state. All of it."

The problem is not state. The problem is being able to recreate the state: both for testing and for business purposes.

The bigger problem is that most programmers, like you, are knee-jerking before the issue of "recreating the state" and declaring that "It cannot be done, because it's all state".

And hence we have both languages who are build by considering mutability to be a virtue and back-end databases (your typical CRUD SQL DB) build upon the same false premises.

I'll give you one example: monday morning the service desk calls because one user of your app, at 3:07pm on friday, experienced a bug.

Can you "recreate the state" your application was in at that time as to be able to figure out what triggered the bug?

You probably can't. Because your DB has changed meanwhile: you're SOL because the 'U' and the 'D' in CRUD are destructive. It's mutability. It's the ennemy of determinism.

So now you're stuck calling your DB admin asking for a dump of the prod DB on last thursday evening and a dump of the log of the transactions that happened on friday... And you're spending hours and hours trying to recreate the state the environment was in when the sht hit the fan. And you may or may not be able to do it.

It's just one hypotethical scenario but things like that is the daily lot of many* programmers.

But software development, in many cases, shouldn't be that painful. If you were to use a CRA DB (Create Read Append) and languages favoring immutability and a more functional approach overall, you'd have a much much easier time recreating the state.

If you think of it, it's all a gigantic determistic machine.

So why can't we accept that the notion of time is an important one?

Why can't you realize that the battle the likes of Rich Hickey are fighting are worth it?

It is possible to use programming languages and DBs (or wrappers like Datomic in front of SQL DBs) that do definitely make it easier to reason about programs and that make it just so much easier to recreate the state and to query the past (which has a lot of business value).

Why do you react like this: "The truth is, it's all state". Saying that as if nothing could be done and as if every single programmer's life should be Java/C# + ORM + XML + SQL hell?

There are people trying to make our life as devs easier. Why not try to listen to what their saying?

Is Rich Hickey "seeing things" with Clojure + Datomic?

To me the combination of a functional language (or at least a language that can be used in a mostly functional way) and a CRA DB (Create Read Append) which incorporates the notion of time from the start is a godsend to our industry.

Why do you close your eyes?

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#86

Post by nemetroid »

I had Haskell as the subject in my intro course at university (my first experience with functional programming). I've tinkered a bit with it since then as well, and I'm at the "somewhat intuitive grasp of monad transformers" state.

I tried Clojure some week ago through the Clojure koans that were posted here. Compared to Haskell I found the syntax very obtuse and it was not obvious why Lisp would be more powerful than Haskell. The bare-bones syntax felt more like a "proof of concept" than an actual strength.

(of course, the koans took less than a day to do so I'm not dismissing Clojure because they didn't impress me, but I got the idea that the koans were an attempt to showcase Clojure's strengths)

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#87

Post by slurry »

spacemanaki wrote: post #66
slurry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Did you read the manual?

For real?

> It's not as easy as setting breakpoints in an IDE

I don't use an IDE. I'm comparing against command line tools for scripting languages, Haskell and Common Lisp. Some fail more helpfully than others.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#88

Post by randallsquared »

lispm wrote: post #52
muuh-gnu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let me correct myself: No competitive free implementation existed able to take a leading position and bootstrap the ecosystem, like gcc, cpython, perl and javac did for their respective language ecosystems. I did not intend to imply that nothing. existed. whatsoever. cmucl, gcl (akcl) and clisp even today are insignificant also-rans and basically unmaintained abandonware.

> No competitive free implementation existed able to take a leading position and bootstrap the ecosystem, like gcc, cpython, perl and javac did for their respective language ecosystems. it was never a goal in the Lisp community to develop a single unified or leading implementation. This has nothing to do with 'free software' or not.

"it was never a goal in the Lisp community to develop a single unified or leading implementation"

...and that's one reason it hasn't ever achieved critical mass: it's so easy to write software that only works on one implementation that the various CLs effectively compete with each other on the same level that each is competing with other rapid development languages. It wasn't CL vs Python vs PHP, but instead CMUCL vs Python vs SBCL vs Lispworks vs PHP vs Allegro. Scheme has a similar problem. These are the problems that come from having a standard instead of a canonical implementation, in my opinion. Canonical implementations promote growth in a way that a standard for a language doesn't.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#89

Post by martinced »

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?"

You know that Hacker News was created by Paul Graham right?

You definitely do want to read Paul Graham's essays.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#90

Post by artursapek »

nemetroid wrote: post #86

I had Haskell as the subject in my intro course at university (my first experience with functional programming). I've tinkered a bit with it since then as well, and I'm at the "somewhat intuitive grasp of monad transformers" state. I tried Clojure some week ago through the Clojure koans that were posted here. Compared to Haskell I found the syntax very obtuse and it was not obvious why Lisp would be more powerful tha…

Do you go to Yale?? Haskell school of music?
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