I still Lisp (2021)
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I still Lisp (2021)
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Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#2I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it.
Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projects on GitHub under themetaschemer. Still though I’m struck by the ratio of lisp project articles vs lisp praising articles hitting HN’s front page.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#3I haven't used a lisp for a few years, but I still remember after it finally "clicked" the weird _velocity_. Code just flooded out.
In other languages I hop around from class defs to class defs, different files. Just richocheting all over the file system. Something about LISP removes a lot of the ricochet. It's a weird sensation.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#4I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…
Kinda by definition the people you hear about are the people that are talking about it and not the people that are using it.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#5I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…
Where would you recommend one starts?
With Racket?
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#6I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…
Kinda by definition the people you hear about are the people that are talking about it and not the people that are using it.
What? You see tons of rust projects hitting HN advertised as rust projects and a very different ratio of this to “rust is the enlightened choice” articles
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#7I haven't used a lisp for a few years, but I still remember after it finally "clicked" the weird _velocity_. Code just flooded out. In other languages I hop around from class defs to class defs, different files. Just richocheting all over the file system. Something about LISP removes a lot of the ricochet. It's a weird sensation.
I didn’t do a lot of Lisp, but I remember solving Project Euler in Scheme and encountering a dynamic programming problem and finding it extremely easy and natural to write a memoize macro with very little language experience.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#8I've been digging into Common Lisp again lately. I'm really enjoying some parts: CLIM is weird but interesting, and the fact that I'm basically developing inside a debugger makes testing and iterating on stuff pretty straightforward. On the other hand, library documentation frequently feels more like the programmer was making notes to himself rather than illustrating how the code might actually be used. I was also pretty shocked when, after using a quick shell script to generate a file containing a big list (~80MB on disk, 800k items) defined in s-expressions, reading it into SBCL exhausted the heap. After telling SBCL it could allocate two gigabytes I was able to read the file, but doing anything with it was a sure-fire way to run out of memory again. I would never think twice about reading an 80MB file into a Go program!
I sort of feel like I'm walking through an abandoned alien city and wondering what size they were, how many limbs they had, and if we share the same 5 senses or not.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#9I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…
Where would you recommend one starts? With Racket?
Every lisp variant is a bit different. Racket, Clojure, and Common Lisp are all excellent. Read a bit about the compromises and dip your toes in one and see if it sticks.
Re: I still Lisp (2021)
#10I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it. Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projec…
I think Lisp has a sort of cachet to it, "lost secret of the ancients scorned by foolish mortals," that draws a lot of people to talk about it endlessly and speculate about how important it is instead of just... using it. I used to see the same thing in the Plan 9 community where people loved to post on the mailing list about all their grand plans for doing stuff with Plan 9, but they never even installed the goddamn thing! If they had, they'd have realized it has some neat ideas but it's also just a software system, and a rough-around-the-edges research system at that. Similarly, Lisp is just a programming language, and regardless of how many blog posts you read about it, you'll still have to actually make the program in the end.