Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

blog.jacius.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#61

Post by pnathan »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #58
pnathan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is really hard to understate the volume of words and man-millenia spent reading and writing about these books. So much brain power spent on scriptures which are, in the light of current knowledge… improbable to say the least. Sounds like a huge waste of effort, really. Take the Genesis, for instance. Currently, only creationist crackpots actually believe it. It's more of a symbol. It seems however that some cent…

Loosely, no. Sorry. :-/

Please don't take hardcore fundamentalist strictly-literalist narratives as the accepted "way" of Christianity.

Genesis was regarded as metaphorical around ~400AD, iirc (Augustine). Pretty sure the modern literalist movement is a post-1850 phenomenon. I don't get into the creation story discussions, it is entirely irrelevant in many ways to me. Waste of our time, IMO.

Judaism in particular is aggressive about doubt and questioning. I read in one intro book on it (by a rabbi, I think) that doubt is one of the defining characteristics of Jewish faith.

Anyway, modern scholarship tries in part to disentangle what was meant in the context of that time and place, determining what the precise meaning (or set of meanings) could have meant, then drawing out inferences to be taken from the work. This does involve, from time to time, revising our understanding of what happened when, where, and why. The story of the early reformation is, in one dimension, loosely a story of rereading the texts and throwing out certain interpretations based on closer analysis.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#62

Post by jlarocco »

agentultra wrote: post #59
jlarocco wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: I meant to note that the reason the specification hasn't been updated, afaik, is because it doesn't have to be updated. All the tools you need to add the features you require are there in the spec. You can make it into the language you need. That's a big part of the reason I haven't used CL for anything bigger than some toy projects. It's a crusty, old language, and instead of keeping up with the times, every…

I don't really understand the, "crusty, old language," argument either. C++ became an ISO-certified specification in 1998 which is roughly around the same time that CL became an ANSI standardized language. We still use C in many systems for very valid reasons. However unlike the C++ and ANSI C standards, the CL specification left room for programmers to extend the language as they need it. Instead of waiting for deca…

It's bad because every implementation fills the gaps in their own incompatible way. And then instead of converging on the "best" solution, the community argues endlessly about each unique solution is the best.

And it's also bad because CL is ancient and it's filled with things that simply don't make sense any more, or have been replaced by "better" solutions in every other language. Look at filename and filepath handling to see what I mean. 2 or 3 of the fields haven't been used in real systems in 20 or 30 years, yet they're kept around because they're in the unchanging CL standard.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#63

Post by hga »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #54
hga wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. On the surface I find Clojure infinitely more ugly than true LISPs ... but if hairing up the syntax with vectors results in more adaptation its a price I'm willing to pay. On the other hand I'm really pleased at its making vectors, maps and sets first class syntactic citizens, and the other things that have unified them with lists. Underneath the hood I think there's no comparison, then again it addresses ex…

> well, no where can you assume TCO. (recur ...) Is an ugly hack. Yes in CL you can assume TCO from good implementations. You know you can add vector/map whatever syntax to CL in like 50 loc? Are you seriously saying that syntactic sugar is in any way relevant to anything? Let alone an important feature of Clojure? Thats just sad. > car and cdr are neat, and even useful in combination, Actually wether you call them c…

Ugly hack ... but maybe a useful one? In that explicitly requesting TCO avoids certain classes of errors? (I don't know on balance, haven't tried TCO in Clojure in anger, and I experience enough value in being in the JVM ecosystem that it's a price I'm in theory willing to pay for now.)

The problem with CL is that you can't assume it in every major implementation. Although I just found this page which paints a fairly good picture: http://0branch.com/notes/tco-cl.html

"The following implementations were found to provide full TCO:

  CMUCL
  SBCL
  CCL
  Allegro
  LispWorks
…only optimise self-calls in tail position:

  CLisp
  GCL
  ECL (when explicitly compiled)
…neither:

  ABCL
Back to me: and CL is so big that "non-major" ports are of much less interest.

As for vector, map and set syntax, that was explicit mentioned as being a surface thing. The real special sauce is in how they've been unified with lists, especially under the hood.

As for your last point, I see great value in all that in the LISPs, although I of course prefer Scheme. But I also see great value in the "Lisp" (LISt Processing no longer the alpha and omega) in what Clojure is doing."

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#64

Post by cdwhite »

pnathan wrote: post #52
cdwhite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Shoot me an email (in my profile) and I'll respond.

Done.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#65

Post by baddox »

> the surest way for a Christian to lose their faith is to read the Bible, cover to cover.

I doubt that, based on my observation of a strong correlation between intense academic study of the Bible and fortitude of Christian faith.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#66

Post by ScottBurson »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #54
hga wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. On the surface I find Clojure infinitely more ugly than true LISPs ... but if hairing up the syntax with vectors results in more adaptation its a price I'm willing to pay. On the other hand I'm really pleased at its making vectors, maps and sets first class syntactic citizens, and the other things that have unified them with lists. Underneath the hood I think there's no comparison, then again it addresses ex…

> well, no where can you assume TCO. (recur ...) Is an ugly hack. Yes in CL you can assume TCO from good implementations. You know you can add vector/map whatever syntax to CL in like 50 loc? Are you seriously saying that syntactic sugar is in any way relevant to anything? Let alone an important feature of Clojure? Thats just sad. > car and cdr are neat, and even useful in combination, Actually wether you call them c…

"A CONS is an object that cares." -- Bernie Greenberg

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#67

Post by baddox »

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…

I also come from the Bible Belt, and point 2 seems reasonable to me, at least if you only consider people of a reasonably modest devotion to their faith (let's say, people with a "home church" where they attend weekly services 30+ weeks a year). Granted, few would have literally read the Bible cover to cover, in order as if it were a large novel.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#68

Post by baddox »

protomyth wrote: post #42
learc83 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

FYI, they are usually arranged fairly cleverly. The ones I remember seeing would run through weekly themes, like "scriptures about love" or "scriptures about finances." They would also often combine relevant Old and New Testament passages together for a day's reading. For example, one day's reading assignment would be one of Jesus' parables that references an Old Testament scripture plus the Old Testament scripture being references. Or, prophetic scriptures would be paired with scriptures detailing the fulfillment of those prophecies.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#69

Post by fusiongyro »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #58
pnathan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is really hard to understate the volume of words and man-millenia spent reading and writing about these books. So much brain power spent on scriptures which are, in the light of current knowledge… improbable to say the least. Sounds like a huge waste of effort, really. Take the Genesis, for instance. Currently, only creationist crackpots actually believe it. It's more of a symbol. It seems however that some cent…

I think if you saw the actual content of these writings you'd be surprised how very little of it has anything to do with whatever it is you imagine it to. The bulk of the Jewish literature is about ethics. The historicity of a story is irrelevant to the ethical questions it raises, and Jewish analysis regards the Bible as primarily a source of questions.

Judaism is not a religion of creed, so Jews are not required to hold any particular beliefs. I expect you'll be surprised to learn that one can be a religious Jew and an atheist (I know a few, and it's "no other gods before me" not "believe in me" before you ask). Whether you believe in God or treat God as simply some kind of metaphor, the point of Judaism is that you must grapple with it, not blindly accept it.

Your final point is hilariously off-base. The mistakes are not only admitted, they are recorded in the book itself. It's easy to impress oneself by reading Leviticus and getting worked up. Make it through Job and Ecclesiastes, and you'll begin to see that complex ideas about this book are established and much older than people assume.

Re: A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

#70

Post by hga »

ScottBurson wrote: post #66
mrottenkolber wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well, no where can you assume TCO. (recur ...) Is an ugly hack. Yes in CL you can assume TCO from good implementations. You know you can add vector/map whatever syntax to CL in like 50 loc? Are you seriously saying that syntactic sugar is in any way relevant to anything? Let alone an important feature of Clojure? Thats just sad. > car and cdr are neat, and even useful in combination, Actually wether you call them c…

"A CONS is an object that cares." -- Bernie Greenberg

Which is followed by: "It cares about its CAR and its CDR." Then as I recall he went to the blackboard.

Still trying to find a copy of his MIT IAP Lisp course notes (haven't tried very hard yet); they and his delivery of them were very very good.

At the same time Jeff Schiller (JIS) would give a short neat talk on how macros worked and why they were neat.

Post reply on HN