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A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

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Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#41

Post by cdwhite »

pnathan wrote: post #37
hga wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

As someone who works for a scholarly text analysis company focused on in-depth & intricate understanding of what Judao-Christian authors meant, I concur with this. It is really hard to understate the volume of words and man-millenia spent reading and writing about these books. So not only is it possible to read your sacred book and still believe it, it's possible to read your sacred book and remaining fragments from…

Your description of "a scholarly text analysis company focused on in-depth & intricate understanding of what Judao-Christian authors meant" really piques my curiosity---I associate that sort of thing with academia (seminaries and religious studies departments, medieval studies, maybe a few classicists), not a (presumably for-profit) company.

If you don't mind my asking, what company do you work for, and what do they do?

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#42

Post by protomyth »

learc83 wrote: post #35
protomyth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Maybe its a Baptist thing Depends on how often they go to church. If they attend regularly for a few years, then the preacher will likely have gone over 80% of the Bible in Sunday morning sermons. And most Baptist churches have some kind of weekly Bible study where you go more in depth. Plus, most Baptist churches I've been to will start some kind of "read the Bible in a year" thing in January--complete with handout…

never heard of the "read the Bible in a year", good to know

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#43

Post by pnathan »

This is a strange article.

Let's address his complaints in two basic areas:

1. Community.

The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be remarkably acerbic to the point of toxic, depending on who feels like contributing at the time. Part of this are the annoying trolls that show up; one's patience wears thin. A FAQ document might go a ways. However, there are a large number of people who don't ream newbies out and really are helpful. lispm here on HN is one of the friendliest Lispers out there and actually has helped me out tons.

Addendum: r/lisp on Reddit is good for generalish Lisp questions. StackOverflow's common lisp tag almost always gets an answer to most any reasonable question. sbcl-devel mailing list is useful if you want to take the time to posit in-depth technical questions to the SBCL developers. Lispforum, oddly enough, I haven't used much. I simply don't go there much. I should, I suppose. :)

2. Technical. I can do no better than quote my /r/lisp post on this (r/lisp is really good for lisp help).

---

First of all, consistency. A variety of things are peculiar in how they are named. TERPRI? Really?

Second, Common Lisp is a (the?) programmable programming language. CLUEL-esque platforms could be used to drive CDR adoption and cleanups of the original language.

My primary gripes with CL are the lack of CDR-2, lack of CDR-8, the lack of hierarchical namespaces, the funky naming conventions & expectations[1], and the lack of deeper CLOS integration[2].

[1] ELT vs AREF vs NTH, for instance. Or, LOOP for lists vs arrays vs (your data structure here).

[2] See CDR-8.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#44

Post by jff »

This reminds me of my experiences with Plan 9. A very cool system, but it's managed to attract some of the absolute worst people in computing. Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. In the end, I just gave up. We tried to drag things kicking and screaming into the 21st century with source control, 64 bit kernel, automated builds and testing, etc. but nobody wanted it.

On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide"

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#45

Post by Theriac25 »

hga wrote: post #30
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.

Have you really looked into CLOS? Because IMHO it doesn't have much common with any of the OO systems in any of the mainstream languages.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#46

Post by Adrock »

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…

Hi tom_b, I'm one of the co-organizers of the NYC Clojure meetup. I don't know if that's the one you attend, but I'm definitely interested in any specific ideas you might have for better introductions and ice breakers.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#47

Post by breckinloggins »

hga wrote: post #21
breckinloggins wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you! This is a big missing piece for some of my research.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#48

Post by AutoCorrect »

protomyth wrote: post #18
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…

Well, certainly the procedure for going to the bathroom is a bit different in modern times[1], and what parts of the Old Testament is a matter of debate between branches of Christians. Heck, the english translation of "thou shalt not (murder|kill)" is a bit of a thing. By the time you get out of bible school and listen to the sermons, you have gone through the whole bible[2]. I just found it very tone deaf to open wi…

the Catholic church did a bit of pruning too, in the 3rd century AD. Council of Nicea

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#50

Post by pavelludiq »

agentultra wrote: post #38

First there are a lot of programmers who come to CL to debate. They read, they study, and then they complain. I've sat in #lisp since about 2007/8 and there have been numerous nicks that show up just to ask a few rather philosophical questions and debate the merits and technical decisions that went into CL. They usually end up leaving and writing blog posts about how terrible a language CL is and how caustic the comm…

Completely agree. One thing that I figured out rather quickly is that lispers really want to teach and explain things, but being lazy programmers, they don't bother holding your hand, so if you are willing to do your homework, you'll have an amazing time with lisp.

Lets take a look at a few patterns I've noticed:

* Newbie posts some snippet and asks for review, the snippet is C++ code written in CL, lisper tells him it sucks, newbie explains that he has a lot of C++ experience and this is how his brain works. Lispers(now plural) explain to him that lisp must be learned with a beginners mind and he must forget C++ temporarily in order to learn it properly. Newbie gets insulted for some reason and begins arguing.

* newbie asks question about "generic lisp", lispers explain that the question makes no sense, and give his an answer about common lisp. Newbie asks question again emphasizing that he isn't interested in Common Lisp but in lisp in general, lispers tell him to read the topic, #lisp is about Common Lisp. Newbie argues that #lisp should be about generic lisp, and #commonlisp or whatever should be about CL, argument goes nowhere of course.

* newbie asks question and posts snippet. The code is obviously written by somebody with exactly 1 hour of lisp experience(parens are mismatched and aligned wrong, indentation is horrible, not to mention the obvious hacks). lispers explain that lisp is best learned patiently and not through the "learn x in y minutes" way, and that he should read Practical Common Lisp. Newbie gets insulted he was told to RTFM instead of getting an actual answer to his "wrong" question(at least in the eyes of us lispers).

* newbie asks about scheme/emacs and refuses to accept that #lisp isn't about those languages, see pattern #2.

* newbie asks scheme vs CL vs clojure vs haskell vs python vs ... question. Gets surprised when lispers unapologetically proclaim CL the best language ever and everything else is shit. Lispers do not hide their bias. Newbie then begins to argue about his favorite language and why it is better than lisp. Sometimes it's clojure, sometimes its scheme, or it could be whatever.

* (my favorite, and probably most frequent) Newbie asks what is lisp good for, gets pissed off when we tell him we program computers with it :)

Many other such questions include:

Q: "why isn't lisp popular" A: You haven't converted enough people to it :) Q: "Why does lisp have so few libraries" A: You haven't written enough libraries yet :) Q: "Why isn't there a library for X" A: Nobody needed it, if you do, write it and push it to github :) Q: "Why doesn't library X do Y" A: patches welcome.

Notice a pattern :)

All of these cases or variations of them have happened many times since I started to frequent #lisp, often times the word "fags" or "cunts" get used, and not by lispers.

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