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Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

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Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#21

Post by mahmud »

herdrick wrote: post #18
mahmud wrote: post #16

Did you really choose Lisp over alternatives? Before learning CL I was a fairly decent, C, C++ and Perl programmer. Did assembly, Pascal, TCL and Awk. Up to that point, I always had to pause a for a minute when starting a new project/script, think about its scope, and choose a language based on the necessary performance, development speed, expressiveness, available libraries, etc. (and whether whoever was going to re…

Really? What has improved in Common Lisp in the past two years? Thanks for this comment.

In the last two years? Clozure Common Lisp at least: an open source multithreaded Lisp implementation with unicode on Win32. Before then it was all Unix. Lisp platform independence is so good, I hack on win32 all day and when I am ready to deploy on Linux, the only warning I get is from git telling me it's converting line endings to Unix style.

The staggering number of new and maturing infrastructure libraries; bordeaux-threads, usocket, CFFI, ASDF, Closure family of XML tools, etc. Lisp-World interop has become trivial. It's not their existence that's new, but their universal adoption by the community. Few years ago you couldn't just download a random lisp library and expect it to work; you had to read the sources and figure things out. Now dependency libraries get downloaded behind the scenes.

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#22

Post by azanar »

smanek wrote: post #6
ricree wrote: post #4

The fact that he proposed removing map, reduce, filter, and lambda from Python 3. In the case of map and filter, is there any compelling reason to use either of those instead of list comprehensions or generator expressions?

Nope - just a style thing. You don't need lambdas either - named functions are just as powerful. But I often think 'functionally.' Since I have options, I'd rather go with a language that allows me to program how I think - instead of being forced to translate my thought into its semantics.

Nope - just a style thing. You don't need lambdas either - named functions are just as powerful.

It depends on what you define as power, and how wide of a continuum you are willing to presume that it runs.

Named functions add two levels of clutter.

The first is to the actual code, because you have to add a name to something that never wanted one, and it has to be defined apart from where it is used. You could give it a fluff name, but that is worse than no name at all. The reader is left wondering what the function is for, which requires carrying unnecessary mental baggage. It would seem more powerful to me that you just define a function where it is used, and not worry about having to carry around that extra mental information for later on; the less state you need to keep the better. But I may only say that because I, like you, tend to think functionally.

The second is to the namespace, because now there is a symbol in the environment that doesn't need to be there. It's not a huge deal, but it is just another bit of extraneous fluff.

Anyway, not meaning to turn this into a language war. Just a couple of thoughts that popped into my head when I read your first paragraph.

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#24

Post by wgj »

Some of the conclusions are inconsistent. For example, Ruby got canned mainly for having a heavyweight framework, since he wants to write everything from scratch. What keeps one from doing that in Ruby? Ruby does not depend on Rails.

His complaint about different versions and implementations is a red herring. Lisp is not immune from this.

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#26

Post by herdrick »

I like the choice. I love to see people using lisps but some of the path to that choice makes me cringe. Like this:

I probably could have written a ‘bare-bones’ implementation of the site’s back-end in Rails in a week instead of two weeks, but I would rather ‘waste’ that one week up front to have more flexibility later.

YAGNI. Speed kills (the competition).

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#28

Post by pwnstigator »

ricree wrote: post #4

The fact that he proposed removing map, reduce, filter, and lambda from Python 3. In the case of map and filter, is there any compelling reason to use either of those instead of list comprehensions or generator expressions?

I like lambda because it allows anonymous functions-- functions that can be defined on the fly (dynamically) and then thrown away. IMO, it's generally bad form for a program to be dynamically creating named functions, filling the namespace.

Also, I like map and filter because they aren't just functions in the procedural sense but combinators: you can pass them around, using them as arguments and returning them. It's much harder to pass around a syntactic entity like a list comprehension (although I'm glad list comprehensions exist; as shorthand they are great in source code.)

All this said, I haven't used Python in 3 years, in favor of purely functional languages such as Clojure and ML, so I might be way out of date.

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#29

Post by gruseom »

herdrick wrote: post #26

I like the choice. I love to see people using lisps but some of the path to that choice makes me cringe. Like this: I probably could have written a ‘bare-bones’ implementation of the site’s back-end in Rails in a week instead of two weeks, but I would rather ‘waste’ that one week up front to have more flexibility later. YAGNI. Speed kills (the competition).

It was the previous sentence that resonated with me:

I’m a bit wary of using ‘heavy weight’ frameworks like Rails (or Django) on large custom projects. In my experience they make the first 90% of what I’m trying to do be really easy – but then make the last 10% a living hell since I need to modify something the framework never intended me to control.

That is a very true statement, in my experience. It's also an elusive insight, because once you commit to a framework you begin to interpret your problem, the universe, and everything in terms of the framework's conceptual space.

Re: Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure

#30

Post by seiji »

helium wrote: post #27

Ok, so Rails is too heavy weight for you? What about Merb? Or Sinatra, which was designed for just that reason? Dismissing Ruby as language because only one of a dozen available web frameworks is too "heavy-weight"sounds a bit short-sighted to me.

Not everybody has time to keep up with the continuous and rapidly increasing micro-speciation of all ruby projects from the VMs down to template formats.
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