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I'm turning into a Lisp snob

briancarper.net

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Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#11

Post by kmcgivney »

intellectronica wrote: post #7

If you're truly passionate about hacking it would be hard to avoid becoming a LISP snob at some point in your development. But if you're pragmatic, you'd be able to transfer what you've learned from LISP to other environments, that may be better suitable for today's technological landscape. Is Google Go the way to go? Only time will tell. But there's little you can usefully do with LISP these days (unless the scope o…

Nice troll. Isn't Hacker News written in lisp?

EDIT: HN is written in Arc. You're saying that there's "little you can usefully do with LISP" on a site which was written in lisp.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#12

Post by omouse »

kunley wrote: post #2

OTOH the Go authors made it clear that it's intended to replace C for the basic system programs & libs. I think that's step in the right direction. I started to earn money using Erlang & Clojure, so looks like I'm not only fan of new exciting high-level langs but also quite an adopter of them in the so-called real world. Still there are some uses when a VM of your Chosen One language brings an unacceptable overhead.…

I think that's step in the right direction.

Maybe for UNIX junkies. Other people would like to use languages that don't suck and operating systems that aren't retarded.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#13

Post by gloob »

omouse wrote: post #12
kunley wrote: post #2

OTOH the Go authors made it clear that it's intended to replace C for the basic system programs & libs. I think that's step in the right direction. I started to earn money using Erlang & Clojure, so looks like I'm not only fan of new exciting high-level langs but also quite an adopter of them in the so-called real world. Still there are some uses when a VM of your Chosen One language brings an unacceptable overhead.…

I think that's step in the right direction. Maybe for UNIX junkies. Other people would like to use languages that don't suck and operating systems that aren't retarded.

Experimental evidence suggests that people want to use Visual Basic and Windows, actually. Although the language stats may have changed since the last time I looked at them, I'm reasonably certain at least Windows is still on top. Make of that what you will.

Edit: For what it's worth, I have some sympathy for Microsoft's position. I don't doubt that if they could just break away from backward compatibility they could make something far less kludgy than what they have; unfortunately, if they did break away from it, they'd lose an awful lot of money. Alas.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#14

Post by jerf »

miloshh wrote: post #4

"I could show these poor imperative programmers how their problems could be solved much easier in Lisp if I wanted to." That to me (as an outsider) seems to be the main message of these Lisp blogs. But at some point, nobody will believe you could do it, unless you actually do.

You seem to be complaining that... Lisp doesn't exist? You seem to be saying his complaints are of the from "A hypothetical language I have in my head can do that better", but the complaint is of the form "This existing language does that all and better."

Given that the only other "problem" in the post is a Hello World post, surely you aren't complaining that the author failed to include a "Hello World" lisp program? Well, here you go:

    (print "Hello World")
I do not understand what you're saying at all.

(Also, I'm not a lisper. In fact I'm increasingly of the opinion that it represents a wrong direction for the future of programming languages. So this is not a "pro-Lisp bias" thing.)

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#17

Post by tome »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #8
shawndumas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. --Antoine de Saint Exupéry

And yet Antoine is famous for book-length works, not poetry, and certainly not minimalist poetry. Don't take the lesson too literally. You can, in fact, take too much away. How much you need to put in depends on your artistic goals and, of course, on your audience.

Well, there's necessary complexity and unnecessary complexity. Perhaps he felt that in order to communicate the ideas and story in his book, he had to write a book length work.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#18

Post by cema »

andybak wrote: post #15

I'm waiting for a Lisp dialect with significant white space. I think I've turned into an anti-brackets-of-any-kind snob.

Lisp programmers already tend to use the indentation the way adopted by Python. Add more rules for indentation and newlining, and voila: all or almost all parentheses become superfluous.

(But you need to really like white space!)

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#19

Post by gwern »

barrkel wrote: post #3

> "Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms" Programming language obscurity is also usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms. Church numerals? The happy place is somewhere in the middle, where there's enough language such that you don't have to build it out of other pieces - and this also helps with performance, static analysis, tooling, debugg…

Having few special forms does not rule out syntax or having useful functions. Look at Scheme, for example. (Or Haskell, most of which syntax desugars into functions you could write yourself, like records or do-notation or list comprehensions.)

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#20

Post by Perceval »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #8
shawndumas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. --Antoine de Saint Exupéry

And yet Antoine is famous for book-length works, not poetry, and certainly not minimalist poetry. Don't take the lesson too literally. You can, in fact, take too much away. How much you need to put in depends on your artistic goals and, of course, on your audience.

  so much depends
  upon

  a red wheel
  barrow

  glazed with rain
  water

  beside the white
  chickens.
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