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A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

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Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#21

Post by hga »

breckinloggins wrote: post #17
hga wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a language like Clojure would have to go the ARC (Automatic Reference Counting, not the language) route. 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…

For your last question you could start by looking at PreScheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#22

Post by protomyth »

breckinloggins wrote: post #5
protomyth wrote: post #3

Perhaps the author will find the answer to the "why" of how unwelcoming a community can be in his choice of opening paragraphs. A story that calls some number of his audience as stupid[1] or ignorant[2] for holding a belief is probably not the best way to introduce your soul searching on why the community he was a part of is not a welcoming one. 1) the implication if you have read your holy book and still believe the…

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…

> Coming from the Bible Belt, I can assure you that point 2 is absolutely false.

Maybe its a Baptist thing, but Catholics and 7th Day Adv defiantly have gone through the whole thing as part of their studies. Nuns do get a little mad when you giggle about certain sections much like and English teacher with some scenes in Shakespeare.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#23

Post by adestefan »

hga wrote: post #19
adestefan wrote: post #11

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…

Maybe ... prior to the R6RS debacle I had my hopes on Scheme, but it's still digging itself out of that mess, plus the long term failure to advance from R5RS that prompted the process change. 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 n…

I was using COBOL and FORTRAN as languages with a long history and didn't mean to imply they were esoteric. I didn't want to write "" because I wanted people to think of more than just old.

But you bring up a good point. Those languages are still around because of the niche they fill. It's okay for LISP to be around only because it fills a niche, too.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#24

Post by 3838 »

tom_b wrote: post #9

As someone who learned a little Lisp in the last few years, I think there is a good collection of books available for the newbie who wants to learn. For Common Lisp, Land of Lisp , Practical Common Lisp , and Ansi Common Lisp all seem good enough to get hacking quickly. Thinking about community effects, I'm not as convinced a community represents a gating factor for hackers. I attend the occasional Clojure meetup (an…

might need to pick your icebreaker with care - some can be downright painful

though "tell us your name, where you're from and one nice thing that happened to you this week" is a non-demanding one

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#25

Post by mrottenkolber »

hga wrote: post #19
adestefan wrote: post #11

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…

Maybe ... prior to the R6RS debacle I had my hopes on Scheme, but it's still digging itself out of that mess, plus the long term failure to advance from R5RS that prompted the process change. 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 n…

Am I the only one who thinks Clojure is extremely ugly, especially compared to CL?

I work a lot with clojure, and it reminds me a lot of when I was forced a hack ruby. There is this guy, or even a group of people, who get caught up in the glamourous idea of reinventing programming. They then jerk their favourite features and design artifacts into a language. The main point of the design seems to be being able to express the thing in fancy words.

Some people love that stuff, they think its beauty and good design because it's somewhat consistent (usually not after the second glance).

I think good design is whats works, and what has evolved due to the needs of practicioners. And that is the beauty of CL, it's shaped by evolution and consensus, not by some vison.

Edit: Also, ever taken into account, that CL is maybe simply good enough? Every possble feature can be included by libraries. There is no need for an updated CL, what we need is more standards like bordeaux-threads, usocket, closer-mop...

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#26

Post by fusiongyro »

There isn't, as far as I'm aware, another language with CL's popularity that provides either its condition system or the full power of the CLOS (method combination, for instance). These two major subsystems are still significant improvements over what modern languages have to offer.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#27

Post by hga »

fusiongyro wrote: post #20
hga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the stuff, period, is in the OT. We Jews have boatloads of commentary addressing the problematic stuff though, so if the problem is reading another possible remedy is more reading.

Exactly. If I were a Christian distressed by things in what we call the Old Testament that I didn't find suitably addressed by Christian scholars, I'd certainly review the Jewish commentaries to see how they addressed those things.

A heck of a lot of intellectual firepower, Jewish and Christian, has been focused on all these texts over a couple of thousand years (more by the Jews?), it would be foolish to abandon your religion based simply on reading the Ur-texts with finding out at least some of what the world's best minds have had to say about them and what they might mean.

Heck, merely reading the wonderful prose of the King James Version requires e.g. recognizing that a lot of its prose was somewhat obsolete when William Tyndale's work from 3/4 of a century earlier was used as the basis of all early printed English bibles. So you need to learn archaic English ... and all of that will do you very well in studying subsequent English prose.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#28

Post by cynicalkane »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #16
breckinloggins wrote: post #4

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…

One interesting thing about having entirely immutable data structures is that you can allocate a temporary heap, and flip the GC around. Copy off just the result and junk the rest without looking at it. All without blocking the main thread. 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 poo…

This is a common practice in GC. For example, the JVM already does this by default, and you don't need to give it immutable data.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#29

Post by lucian1900 »

breckinloggins wrote: post #4

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…

For the native target, LLVM might not necessarily be the best choice. clojure-scheme [1] is an interesting approach, there might be some other suitable target that produces native executables as well.

1. https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#30

Post by hga »

fusiongyro wrote: post #26

There isn't, as far as I'm aware, another language with CL's popularity that provides either its condition system or the full power of the CLOS (method combination, for instance). These two major subsystems are still significant improvements over what modern languages have to offer.

Good point about CLOS, but for a lot of us who've gained an allergy to OO over the years, especially in its difficult relation to functional programming, that's of limited appeal unless you're working in one of the areas its fruitfully employed.

Would have to look at it's condition system, it's been way too long.

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