11–20 of 82 posts
Maybe LISP doesn't need saved? Maybe it's okay that a language isn't popular? Maybe It's okay that a language isn't hip? Maybe it's okay if a language doesn't have the latest gee wiz social status? The fact that people keep trying to save LISP every 4 or 5 years could mean it's perfectly fine how it is. I don't see people trying to save the COBOL, or FORTRAN, or community.
I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space: - Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement. - Base FFI and code…
While I agree that most of the other points are valid personal opinions, this one could safely be ignored. New Clojure users are largely converted from the enormous Java, Scala, Ruby, ... developer pool, and ignoring the projected wishes of (Common) Lisp programmers is a valid choice.
These days I focus more on writing useful code and making end users happy and I've found that to be much more satisfying than wringing my hands over the inelegance of everyday languages.
I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space: - Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement. - Base FFI and code…
In certain circumstances - for instance a web framework creating a heap for each request - this will make GC dramatically cheaper. Though of course your cache locality will be poor.
I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space: - Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement. - Base FFI and code…
Strong caveat about LLVM: it's not a good target for precise garbage collection, at a certain point the distinction between pointers and integers is lost. Fixing that would require diving into and writing a lot of C++, and I'd rather do that sort of work with a safe pointer language or drop all pretenses for the lowest level stuff.
Whether that's even possible is another matter, but I agree that the LLVM memory management problem is an interesting one.
Another question is whether there should exist a "sys lisp" that can form the lisp core of higher level lisps but that itself is not a garbage collected lisp. I don't immediately see a way forward on that one, but it's an interesting thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from the Bible Belt, I can assure you that point 2 is absolutely false. That said, even as a non-Christian I was also uncomfortable with that as an introduction. I'm sure many Lispers are of the opinion that almost 100% of their peers are atheists or other "nones", but that's (I suspect) more a function of geography than language choice. It's unwise to turn off what could be a significant portion of your reade…
Indeed, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This author has told us up front attracting people to LISP/Clojure is not his primary goal. There's also the minor detail that if you're a Christian the really canon stuff is in the New Testament, a lot if not most of the problematic stuff is in the Old Testament and not longer strictly applies (surely most of us remember "Let he who is without sin cast the fi…
I just found it very tone deaf to open with that kind of story when it basically has the same effect as what he is complaining about. Its just odd.
1) Although if you happen to hit a disaster, reviewing a bit of the health guidelines in Leviticus couldn't hurt. It will also probably help if you remember a lot of it is basic how-not-to-die health guidelines.
2) I came from the Catholic and 7th Day Adv family (yeah, not exactly the most agreeable to mix), and both seem to have gone through the whole thing. Plus, they have a bit of disagreement as to what constitutes the whole thing. Luther did a bit of pruning.
Is this not just another point in a decades long quest to save LISP? Maybe LISP doesn't need saved? Maybe it's okay that a language isn't popular? Maybe It's okay that a language isn't hip? Maybe it's okay if a language doesn't have the latest gee wiz social status? The fact that people keep trying to save LISP every 4 or 5 years could mean it's perfectly fine how it is. I don't see people trying to save the COBOL, o…
Common Lisp has had 3 decades to get its act together and is an abject failure in my view, plus it's got a half century of accumulated backwards compatibility accreted messiness.
Clojure is not a LISP, as in LISt Processing is not its alpha and omega. For now I won't go into details on I think it's being so successful, expect to point out that its architect has exquisite taste and savvy pragmatism, has made some great innovations in e.g. making maps and vectors syntactically first class citizens, and of course if you like serious functional programming and/or multi-core SMP/ccNUMA programming is has a great story. And most of all it's developed an ecosystem that has left Common Lisp and Scheme in the dust.
BTW, I don't think anyone needs to "save" COBOL, it's still used a lot, and as I understand it FORTRAN is still going strong in its niche, with regular new standard. Either are very far from being esoteric languages, although COBOL action is mostly hidden in the IT departments of organizations that write and maintain their custom systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from the Bible Belt, I can assure you that point 2 is absolutely false. That said, even as a non-Christian I was also uncomfortable with that as an introduction. I'm sure many Lispers are of the opinion that almost 100% of their peers are atheists or other "nones", but that's (I suspect) more a function of geography than language choice. It's unwise to turn off what could be a significant portion of your reade…
Indeed, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This author has told us up front attracting people to LISP/Clojure is not his primary goal. There's also the minor detail that if you're a Christian the really canon stuff is in the New Testament, a lot if not most of the problematic stuff is in the Old Testament and not longer strictly applies (surely most of us remember "Let he who is without sin cast the fi…