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I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system

mikelevins.livejournal.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system

#7
post #5

exactly why i don't like Lisp: every Lisp hacker makes his own object or whatever system, making it hard for other people to understand his work.

Writing unmaintainable crap is really the fault of the programmer, not the language, isn't it? You can write unmaintainable stuff in any language and I think Lisp is particularly good at helping the developer keeping the code clean and easily readable (despite it being very powerful so it's easy to do very stupid things, I must admit that.)

Re: I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system

#8
post #5

exactly why i don't like Lisp: every Lisp hacker makes his own object or whatever system, making it hard for other people to understand his work.

This is, indeed, a symptom of the main problem with lisps today; there's so much power available, but a lack of incentives about not using it capriciously. Everyone writes their own implementations of relatively basic things, because the existing libraries don't do things in exactly the way they'd prefer, and it's just not painful to write a library that does just the parts you need. Clojure might get around this by tying itself to Java, as long as most Clojurists come from the Java world and are used to using those same libraries already.

Re: I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system

#9
post #4

I wouldn't mind seeing the author's code. I decided to use Clojure for a project, and while it has generally been a good experience, I do miss the ability to strategically apply CLOS in places.

I'll be ecstatic if it is well done; I'd love for Clojure to be multi-paradigm (even if the object system was a bolted-on one).

Re: I did what any sensible Lisp hacker does: I wrote my own object system

#10
post #5

exactly why i don't like Lisp: every Lisp hacker makes his own object or whatever system, making it hard for other people to understand his work.

Well, there are certainly 2 schools of thought; the "there should only be one way to do it" school of thought and TIMTOWDI.

I don't think you should write off lisp just because it's too flexible. If anything, that makes it much more interesting to learn - there are lots of ways to do things. Clojure currently says there should be one obvious way to do it; so maybe you should check that out.

Idiomatic Clojure wouldn't really embrace an object system anyways since it's meant to be pragmatically functional.

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