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Why Racket? Why Lisp?

practicaltypography.com

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Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#61

Post by pjmlp »

dkersten wrote: post #52
_ofdw wrote: post #6

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…

giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink I hadn't even noticed that they're hyperlinks, I thought something had went wrong with the text formatting or character set! I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. Needed to is too strong a statement. I've never needed to write a macro (and in Clojure, its somewhat frowned upon to write macros w…

> I program in Clojure fulltime and I don't find that it has any more parentheses than a language like C++ or Java does.

People see the parentheses and go crazy, but in fact it is just a matter of moving the opening parentheses.

I now use this approach when explaining Lispy languages to others.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#63

Post by aaron-lebo »

swah wrote: post #54
_ofdw wrote: post #6

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…

I didn't mind but note that he wrote http://practicaltypography.com . As for not missing stuff from Lisps, I think opportunities start appearing once you start using it more. But I agree, it doesn't prevent you from getting things done.. I don't see any Lisp in the Go space (native compilation, great networking features), so I find Go more pragmatic at this time.

I think Gambit Scheme has both of those features. Granted, it doesn't have the community or momentum of Go, but it exists.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#64

Post by andreasvc »

pron wrote: post #58
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

From what I've seen out of the Clojure community over the past few years, it seems like they're far more likely (and able) to offer up concrete examples of how Clojure makes their businesses and products successful in a way that an imperative language could not. So, yay Clojure community, and boo on hand-wavy Lisp people. e.g.: http://www.kreuzwerker.de/en/blog/posts/why-clojure-rocks-2/ https://news.ycombinator.com/…

> ... in a way that an imperative language could not Perhaps a nitpick, but sometimes nomenclature is important. Clojure (like all Lisps) is an imperative programming language. "Imperative" languages are contrasted with "declarative" languages[1]. Where does functional fit in and what is the name for "non-functional"? Well, that's not clear, as "functional" (in the PL sense) doesn't even have an agreed upon definitio…

I think declarative should be contrasted with procedural, not imperative. Also, your reference/footnote [1] is missing.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#65

Post by cturner »

DCKing wrote: post #45

Why Lisp? That is understood. Why Racket? From an ignorant outsider's perspective, all Lisps seem to be more or less interchangeable when it comes to the language. They only differ in the details, and each seems to be about as difficult to learn as the other. Although this article does make somewhat of a case for specifically Racket, it seems to be a rather weak one - tools are nice and some language details are nice…

Racket has strong multi-platform support of its own. I actually chose racket over options like clojure for building a game, because I wanted to be able to be able to easily and quickly package one codebase for deployment on windows (running in a window), OSX (running in a window) and linux (running in a terminal). From the standard install, you can quickly package code to a stand-alone binary. With Clojure, some users would need to install a JVM. Clojure's great though.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#66

Post by wtetzner »

pron wrote: post #58
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

From what I've seen out of the Clojure community over the past few years, it seems like they're far more likely (and able) to offer up concrete examples of how Clojure makes their businesses and products successful in a way that an imperative language could not. So, yay Clojure community, and boo on hand-wavy Lisp people. e.g.: http://www.kreuzwerker.de/en/blog/posts/why-clojure-rocks-2/ https://news.ycombinator.com/…

> ... in a way that an imperative language could not Perhaps a nitpick, but sometimes nomenclature is important. Clojure (like all Lisps) is an imperative programming language. "Imperative" languages are contrasted with "declarative" languages[1]. Where does functional fit in and what is the name for "non-functional"? Well, that's not clear, as "functional" (in the PL sense) doesn't even have an agreed upon definitio…

Actually, I would say that protocols are more influenced by Haskell type classes than OO interfaces.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#67

Post by andreasvc »

bad_user wrote: post #42
jsmeaton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume it'd be the same as people complaining about significant whitespace in python. No one who actually programs in python complains about the whitespace.

I developed in Python for several years and I disliked whitespace, because sometimes I want the flexibility to format code in a way that makes more sense given the right context and the whitespace was always in my way. Plus, its whitespace-based syntax was used as an argument to not evolve the language, being one reason for why they haven't added proper anonymous functions. I can't comment on LISP's parens much, for…

Python has proper lexical closures in the form of inner functions. Can some please enlighten me why one would still insist on multi-line anonymous functions? For documentation purposes it's a) better to give something a name, b) have a multi-line function in a separate place instead of inline in the form of a lambda.

Concerning whitespace, serious (large) projects have a very specific style guide, which includes prescriptions on whitespace. Python doesn't add any extra restrictions to that and in other languages a mismatch between whitespace and braces is a frequent source of bugs, so significant whitespace avoids that as well.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

_ofdw wrote: post #6

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…

> As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression-is-a-list feature prevented me from doing what I wanted to do.

This is classic Blub paradox. You don't feel like you need a feature until you start using it, at which point you start wondering how anyone can live without it. Tools you have available limit the thoughts you can have. That's why it's always good to look for better and more powerful tools :).

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#69

Post by therockhead »

cespare wrote: post #9
_ofdw wrote: post #6

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…

As someone who writes Lisp (well, Clojure) every day and does not particularly enjoy it, I find the common complaint about parentheses to be a non-issue. In fact, I'm not sure I've heard of anyone who wrote any significant amount of lisp code and came away talking about parentheses. This seems to be mostly a reaction from people who've read a bit of Lisp without using it. Then again, I just noticed that I type ( and…

For me it is the prefix notation and still find nested expressions difficult to read.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#70

Post by andreasvc »

jahnu wrote: post #27
jsmeaton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume it'd be the same as people complaining about significant whitespace in python. No one who actually programs in python complains about the whitespace.

I find it a pain and error prone when having to change indentation in python code. E.g. when adding an 'if' in front of a block of code. So easy to miss a line or mess up the indentation in the block itself and then you might not spot an error until run time.

It's not a pain if you use an editor which lets you indent a whole block of code at once; e.g., in vim, use shift-V to select lines of code, then >> or << to in- or dedent. This is handy for all programming languages, of course.
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