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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

#201

Post by bjourne »

eggsby wrote: post #145
bjourne wrote: post #68

Great story. Unfortunately, the API documentation and tutorial writing guilds went extinct decades ago and has never been able to return to Lispland. :)

The comic references clojure in multiple sections (multicore, lazy), I think you'll find the tutorial and documentation guilds still alive and well there.

Actually my snide remark came from trying to find docs for Clojure libraries. :) Clojure Docs (http://clojuredocs.org/) is alright for the standard library, API documentation (http://clojure.github.com/clojure/) not so nice. But finding complete and updated docs for Compojure or any other of Clojure's web frameworks is impossible. Ironically, Noir (http://www.webnoir.org/) seem to be the best documented of the bunch but it has been deprecated.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#202

Post by LispShmisp »

lispm wrote: post #143
jgeralnik wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 The word because means that if there was no Lisp application the war would not have been won. This is almost certainly false, even if the Lisp application did make things easier.

without that application, nobody would have been there.

Well, if you go as far as to say that without Lisp nobody would have been there... Is it fair to say that Lisp started the war?

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#203

Post by draegtun »

chimeracoder wrote: post #100
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…

> I found the syntax very obtuse and it was not obvious why Lisp would be more powerful than Haskell. The easiest answer to that is, there's no syntax, which makes reimplementing your own Lisp parser trivial (one single function call, in fact). This in turn makes reimplementing your own Lisp, inline in Lisp, similarly trivial. That sounds like something out of an SICP exercise - and it is - but the same properties ma…

If pg then perhaps it was (or stems from) this: Programming Bottom-Up - http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#204

Post by pavelludiq »

ludston wrote: post #200
orthecreedence wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opengl bindings don't really need documentation, as they're automatically generated to mirror the C API. Really, if you want to know how to use `cl-opengl`, you memorize a simple naming convention and the rest is a matter of "how do I use OpenGL," not "how do I use cl-opengl?"

That's great, but I haven't learned C. Besides that, leveraging documentation from another language is a hack. As it stands, there isn't documentation around for learning to create 3d graphics without needing to know other languages first.

Are you trolling? First off, learning C well enough to understand opengl documentation will take you much less time that understanding opengl it self(since you'll only need to read and not write C). You have a problem, people gave you a solution, having separate cl docs for opengl that have THE SAME contents, but using lisp function names instead of C ones(as it was explained, it is simple function to transform one into the other in your head). What the hell do you want?

PS I forgot why I stopped commenting on HN threads about lisp. If you read the old usenet, this kind of discussion has been plaguing lisp since day one. People complain, and when given the solution, they just start bitching about something else, avoiding the solution. There are no docs, now the docs are in C, what else? As I've become part of the lisp community, I learned the proper way to fix this, If I encounter deficiency in the lisp ecosystem, I deal with it if I can, and If I can't I politely ask the author/maintainer if they have time to work on the issue. If they don't have the time, I simply accept reality, and move on with my problems. Bitching on HN solves nothing. Honestly, why lisp? Why do people have this supreme need to express their dissatisfaction with a language, with libraries developed by humans in their spare time away from their lives, for free. Be fucking happy, and help out if you care about lisp, otherwise, just shut up!

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#206

Post by groovy2shoes »

manish_gill wrote: post #197
thecombjelly wrote: post #155

I love lisp. I use/used it to build my web service product[1] and anything else I can. =how do I do X?= java: something similar to X is already done in Y. add abstract class and redo X and write Y. +200 LOC lisp: something similar to X is already done in Y. realize you can generalize X and Y into a new pattern and use it for ABC too. -70 LOC =there is a bug in function X= java: open X.java. edit line. restart program…

I'm foraying into the lisp land for the first time with SICP, and the one thing that bothers me the most is that Scheme is so hard to debug. As a Python programmer who is used to just used to print debugging, this becomes very frustrating very early on.

What's preventing you from print debugging in Scheme? For convenience, I almost always define something like this:

    (define (println . args)
      (for-each (lambda (arg)
                  (display arg)
                  (display " "))
                args)
      (newline))

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#207

Post by [deleted] »

lispm wrote: post #143
jgeralnik wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 The word because means that if there was no Lisp application the war would not have been won. This is almost certainly false, even if the Lisp application did make things easier.

without that application, nobody would have been there.

[deleted]

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#208

Post by biot »

lispm wrote: post #136
jgeralnik wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because supposedly a piece of software performing a critical purpose was written in lisp does not mean lisp won the war. If the software wasn't written in lisp, it would have been written in any other language. And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead. Did the software help? Probably. It's likely there would have been more screw…

But there was no other software. It was a logistics system written in Lisp which moved fleets, troops and supplies. It was based on a decade of research in various planning software written in Lisp. > And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead. How so? How should it work to move hundred thousands of people with hundreds of thousands di…

  > How should it work to move hundred thousands of people
  > with hundreds of thousands different types of things
  > between several continents? In a few months?
Have you considered reading a WWII history book? That was a far more impressive and substantial mobilization to multiple countries spanning multiple continents which was done without the benefit of software. It took more than a few months largely because they had to manufacture equipment and recruit/train personnel from scratch.

Either you're doing one epic troll or you're displaying a staggering ignorance of the ability for militaries going back to the time of the Roman Empire to do significant mobilizations.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#209

Post by JadeNB »

jeffdavis wrote: post #128
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…

"Compared to Haskell I found the syntax very obtuse and it was not obvious why Lisp would be more powerful than Haskell." Language "power" is ill-defined, and basically means "good". If you think that homoiconicity is good, then you probably like lisp. If you think that referential transparency is good, then you probably like haskell. Those are mutually exclusive, so one language can't really have both. But either on…

> If you think that homoiconicity is good, then you probably like lisp. If you think that referential transparency is good, then you probably like haskell. Those are mutually exclusive, so one language can't really have both.

This mutual exclusivity is a strange claim that I have never encountered before (but I'm not a computer scientist). Could you explain it?

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#210

Post by falcolas »

klibertp wrote: post #168
falcolas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hampe…

It didn't change last time I checked - Emacs is still almost mandatory for almost all tutorials on Lisps (I searched for beginner tutorial for Clojure about half a year ago). I find this attitude stupid too. Emacs is a great editor, not to mention operating system, but I just don't like it and I feel that I have the right to do so. It shouldn't be too costly to list the alternatives and help with getting expected fun…

Good information, thank you.
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