I'm turning into a Lisp snob • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#31

Post by miloshh » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:33 PM UTC

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?…

Well, Lisp sure does exist, and has been used to solve real world problems. But those were predominatly in applications where performance, parallelism, graphics, large matrix computations and GUIs do not matter. If you want to pick on the imperative languages (i.e. Pascal/Fortran/C/C++), you better show you can do what they can do.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#32

Post by mmphosis » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:34 PM UTC

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 tried:

    (print "Hello World")

The result I expected was:

    Hello World

The result I got was:

    "Hello World"

In the language we are using, the "Hello World" program is simply:

    Hello World

but, this is my anti-Lisp bias thing.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#33

Post by kunley » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:38 PM UTC

gloob wrote: post #13

omouse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Erm, do people want to use VB for programming libraries and core system tools? (I thought we're talking about such case, as Go authors clearly stated that's their target).

Go competes rather with C/C++ than with VB or any Lisp.

C'mon guys, you don't have to bash any language or solution only because somebody wants to use it for some reason (which may be different than yours).

Having Go in a toolchain traditionally reserved to gcc will only make things better and will NOT threaten a position of your shiny new high level language.

I wish Go people success. They are smart hackers from the ol' days.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#34

Post by miloshh » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:45 PM UTC

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.

So, I guess a real criticism of Lisp would be that it is stuck in the past. Lispers are still looking down on C; they never try to look up. If they did, they would see languages like ML and Haskell have surpassed them in all respects. Heck, even Matlab and its descendants with the "everything is a matrix" philosophy have created a powerful new paradigm that is certainly not a special case of "everything is a list". In short, the world has flown by Lisp, and Lispers (at least the vocal ones on blogs) still did not notice.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#35

Post by mike_organon » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:47 PM UTC

ekiru wrote: post #29

pavelludiq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is value in static checking for some things, but it is also limiting. It requires that code be written such that those things are declarative, can be understood without running the program. There is also value in having those things to be programmable, dynamic. This is a "good reason" even if you prefer the alternative. In Clojure, the lack of static type checking was not done out of laziness.

> there is no good reason for a modern language to lack a powerful type system.

Lisps can and do have powerful type systems - you're confusing dynamic with none at all.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#36

Post by mahmud » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:49 PM UTC

mmphosis wrote: post #32

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 tried: (print "Hello World") The result I expected was: Hello World The result I got was: "Hello World" In the language we are using, the "Hello World" program is simply: Hello World but, this is my anti-Lisp bias thing.

Lisp "printing" is used for two different purposes: 1) to display results for a human reader/viewer. and 2) to serialize Lisp forms for later READing.

Instead of print, try princ.

  [1]> (princ "hello world")
  hello world
  "hello world"

The first unquoted string is the rendered display of the PRINT function, a side-effect. The second quoted string is the result, print returns the string it printed as a result.

Try nesting them and see what happens: (princ (princ "hello world"))

You admit to having an anti-lisp bias without knowing anything about lisp. This whole "I hate it because I don't know it" thing is silly and unbecoming of good programmers.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#37

Post by cschep » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:54 PM UTC

maelstrom wrote: post #22

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....

I think the standard argument would be that the average programmers are using average languages, so popularity is a horrible measuring stick for powerful languages.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#38

Post by kunley » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 7:04 PM UTC

jstraszheim wrote: post #21

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?…

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

If Go people succeeded with taking over some C area, that would be the direction right enough, don't you think? Simply because Go seems a bit better than C.

I'd love to see some modern SML or Haskell taking over the area of code compiled to binary, plus a constant growth of dynamic languages as well, because they are also cool. But that big revolution may not happen.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#39

Post by briancooley » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 7:13 PM UTC

maelstrom wrote: post #22

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....

Well, there's the stuff from ITA Software that powers Orbitz. Flightcaster is using Clojure. Impact Solutions in Houston uses Lisp for real time analysis of oil rig data.

There're a lot more.

Re: I'm turning into a Lisp snob

#40

Post by mahmud » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 7:13 PM UTC

maelstrom wrote: post #22

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....

That's a logical fallacy. Something can be both great and unknown to you. Usually, you seek information about things you know you need/want, and can afford. If a topic does not interest you, you will forever remain oblivious to it, except maybe for some tangential news about it that reach you by accident.

It's naive to think that just because you're a programmer you know everything there is to know about the software industry. You don't. You know about a small fraction of the mainstream development tools, and even those, at a superficial level. For example, can you name the top software products for running local elections? how about automating a chemistry research lab? packages for oil exploration? vacation property management? real-time spoken Chinese processing? computational archeology? artist talent management? threat modeling for distributed corporate networks?

See? :-)

"Social" programmers, the guys you see in chat rooms and "community" websites are all mostly generalists, and typically work in well defined roles as grunt programmers. Nothing fancy, website here, a database there, a GUI or two, click, generate, zip, distribute, and call it a day type work. Don't let this closed echo-system define your perception of "the software industry".