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

111–120 of 239 posts

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#111

Post by rafcavallaro »

PuercoPop wrote: post #64
dschiptsov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

lisp is much more regular in syntax than most popular languages, and Xah's page that you point to amounts to little more than saying "I don't know lisp well, so I find various aspects of the language - backquote, quote, unquote-splicing, etc. - confusing."

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#112

Post by falcolas »

wglb wrote: post #108
falcolas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more? Speaking just for myself, it's because most commonly available distributions (such as SLIME) require you to learn a new editor on top of learning a new language. I think emacs is great, but it's not my editor of choice, and when a language distribution all but requires you to use emacs, it's going to have a hard time gaining traction with me. This may have changed over th…

There is slime for VI. And Paul Graham and team used VI and clisp to build the store software--no IDE. If you read Coders At Work http://codersatwork.com/ the grown-ups don't use IDEs.

Ignoring the condescending remark for now, it probably was possible to run lisp without Emacs, but none of the tutorials mentioned how. They all pointed towards Emacs.

If I recall correctly, one tutorial (and several IRC lispers) even stated the following: "How do I use this with vim? Just use Emacs + SLIME, you'll be better off for it."

It's probably changed (at least I certainly hope it has), but it certainly hampered my adoption of lisp.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#113

Post by lispm »

mturmon wrote: post #110
lispm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically they had to wait for the Iraq invasion until the Lisp software was ready. > Because IIRC it was won because it was fought by superpower against a small country with 1/1000 the military resources. The Lisp software moved the 1000* military resources to Iraq.

Software does not move tanks. It's one part of an overall system that moves tanks. You over-reached on that point; it happens.

Software moves fleets. Coordinates ten of thousands flights. Make sure that hundred thousands soldiers have supplies.

It's called logistics.

It's a new world.

It happened.

It's been said that this single piece of software paid back for all DoD AI research.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#114

Post by chongli »

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…

>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.

The answer is that Lisp code is written with Lisp data (the property known as homoiconicity). Why is this an advantage? Because it greatly simplifies metaprogramming; Lisp macros are simply functions that operate on Lisp data structures.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#116

Post by pchristensen »

mwexler wrote: post #41

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

Ruby Rogues podcast discussed it with the author (1hr mp3, transcript available): http://rubyrogues.com/043-rr-book-club-land-of-list-with-con...

Incidentally, the author (Conrad Barski) says in that discussion that Clojure is his favorite Lisp now and he finds it much more elegant than Common Lisp. I have a similar background (CL programming, now doing Clojure) and I agree.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#117

Post by JabavuAdams »

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?

Productivity is about language + libraries + frameworks + community + your own familiarity with all of the above. The language is really the least concern when actually delivering features in a timely manner.

Programming is a high-variance activity. It's not that some programmers are 10x faster than others -- it's that an individual programmer may have 10x variance in performance on different days/weeks.

So, the two most effective things a programmer can do to become more productive are: (1) Get enough sleep. (2) Don't write code -- use libraries.

To the extent that Lisp's meta-programming support can help with (2), it's useful, but usually the lack of discoverable, minimalist, production-tested libraries is a worse tradeoff.

Essentially, the other ecosystems are good enough, and the Lisp ecosystem is not great for the bang-out-10-features-today style of most app development.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#118

Post by JabavuAdams »

lispm wrote: post #49
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.

CMUCL was from the start very significant. DEC Common Lisp was based on CMUCL. LispWorks was based on CMUCL. Scieneer Common Lisp is also based on CMUCL. SBCL is a fork of CMUCL. SBCL is very popular in the 'free software' Lisp community - it's just a repackaged CMUCL. Lot's of other Lisp implementations took and still are taking code from CMUCL, since it is 'Public Domain'. Free software. Btw., CMUCL still has month…

The paradox of choice.

One implementation that's good for 80% of users will gain more traction than 10 implementations where each user has to figure out which one to use.

Lisp attracts maximizers, while satisficers are more successful at delivering software to real people.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#119

Post by king_magic »

S4M wrote: post #91
king_magic wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I think the link posted here is doing little to make lisp popular, especially compared for example to a nice tutorial like the Seesaw example one to build GUIs in Clojure [0]. There, you can see how interactive Clojure is, and how fast it can be to develop stuff. Note that I took this example because it's on the top of my mind, but I am sure similar proves of interactivity can be made for other lisps. [0] https…

Holy crap, Seesaw looks awesome! See, that's far more powerful - I had no idea that even existed, and now I'm excited to play around with it. This is great!

I don't need a cartoon to sell me on something. I need to see how something can be used.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#120

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

S4M wrote: post #91
king_magic wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I think the link posted here is doing little to make lisp popular, especially compared for example to a nice tutorial like the Seesaw example one to build GUIs in Clojure [0]. There, you can see how interactive Clojure is, and how fast it can be to develop stuff. Note that I took this example because it's on the top of my mind, but I am sure similar proves of interactivity can be made for other lisps. [0] https…

Thank you so much for that link!. I'd been meaning to check out Seesaw, and it really lives up to its promise of making Java GUI's less painful.
Post reply on HN