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I'm turning into a Lisp snob

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Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#21

Post by jstraszheim »

jerf wrote: post #14
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?…

Just curious, what do you think is the right direction?

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#22

Post by maelstrom »

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.

Yes, if Lisp is so powerful, where are all the super programs written in it? I'm only aware of EMACs and maybe at one point Autocad? And I guess PG wrote a couple webapps with it....

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#23

Post by gloob »

cema wrote: post #18
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!)

Brackets make macros easy, because they make the abstract syntax tree blatant. Make it less blatant, and macros will become much more difficult to write. Given the options of i) macros are easy to write, and ii) Python-style indentation rules enforced by the interpreter/compiler, I'll take (i).

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#24

Post by pavelludiq »

jerf wrote: post #14
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?…

I'm curious, i rarely see any REAL[1] criticism of lisp, just the old "ughh, my eyes, all those parenthesis, aaa" type of nonsense. Why do you think its a wrong direction?

[1] Im not talking about implementations, obviously, Common lisp, scheme and clojure have their problems, im talking about the general idea of lisp.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#25

Post by kunley »

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.

You are missing the point. Replace vi & grep with your most used dlls.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#26

Post by forensic »

kmcgivney wrote: post #11
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.

Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#27

Post by tom_b »

Snob or not, what increasingly pulls me to languages are the highly productive DSLs that seem to fall out of them. For example, I need to deliver a few lightweight web apps/services - and I stumble across Sinatra on Ruby (with a little Sequel thrown in mixed with the oci8 oracle gem), which seems to do all I need. My little ruby code snippets look just like that - snippets that are short and expressive of the what I'm trying to do.

Lisp seems to be the "godfather" of these things and I'm more and more interested in what makes me productive, without being surrounded by a team of enterprise programmers and all the boilerplate that seems to fall out of other languages.

I make my living hacking SQL. What I'm really looking for there is the ability to create a lambda on the fly for custom grouping (eg implementing a business rule dynamically). I've worked on at least three big enterprise projects where I could have eliminated thousands, if not tens of thousands of LOC with a feature like that. Maybe I should punt and roll with a Prolog engine in the Lisp of choice. Who knows.

I really enjoy the articles and comments on these topics here on HN. Keep 'em coming.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#28

Post by pg »

forensic wrote: post #26
kmcgivney wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.

No, that's not true. The software works quite well, especially considering how few lines of code it is. (To be able to say that was one of the goals for both app and language.)

What I said was that it's not user features that keep people here. But there is more to the software than user features. A good example is the code that protects against various kinds of abuse, like spam, trolls, and voting rings. By LOC that is a large percentage of the total, and HN as a community would be long since dead without it.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#29

Post by ekiru »

pavelludiq wrote: post #24
jerf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

I'm curious, i rarely see any REAL[1] criticism of lisp, just the old "ughh, my eyes, all those parenthesis, aaa" type of nonsense. Why do you think its a wrong direction? [1] Im not talking about implementations, obviously, Common lisp, scheme and clojure have their problems, im talking about the general idea of lisp.

I also feel that Lisp is a wrong direction. Its main problem is the lack of static typing. It is understandable that a language which has existed for so long with relatively little change would lack a static type system, but with as much progress as has been made in research on type systems since then, there is no good reason for a modern language to lack a powerful type system.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#30

Post by sedachv »

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…

One observation to be made is that Common Lisp has 25 special forms (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...). That's quite a lot. But none of them are redundant or superfluous.
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