Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#11

Post by Retric »

jcelerier wrote: post #7
sctb wrote: post #4

Previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. " well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan... There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year fro…

That has nothing to do with learning English.

It’s based on the premise ‘as an English speaker’ these languages are easy to learn. But, if your native language where say Dutch you get a different list than if your native language is Japanese.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#12

Post by teraflop »

jcelerier wrote: post #7
sctb wrote: post #4

Previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. " well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan... There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year fro…

That table is ranking languages by how easy they are for an English speaker to learn -- that is, how much commonality they have with English. It doesn't make any claim about English having some fundamental property that makes it easier to learn.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#15

Post by cheez »

I first met Lisp in university and I fell in love immediately. Over the years though, I went through the same thing as the author here and now I'm happy with the mainstream languages.

I still think it's beauty is unrivalled but in the OO world, Typescript comes pretty close.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#17

Post by ared38 »

jcelerier wrote: post #7
sctb wrote: post #4

Previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. " well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan... There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year fro…

That table is expressly from the point of view of an English speaker; I'm sure it would look very different if written for Arabic speakers. Since it's largely a function of similarity to your native tongue, how would we even measure if a language is easy or hard to learn?

And what counts as "normal language classes"? Until at least high school in the US, every class other than math focuses on reading and writing.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#18

Post by johan_larson »

> BTW, ignorant is not a pejorative term. If you think it is you are ignorant and you need to go look the word up in a dictionary.

Did that. The Merriam-Webster, in fact. Here's what they said:

> There are several meanings of ignorant, all of which are concerned with a lack of knowledge in some sense; some of these are more insulting than others, and care should be exercised before applying this word to people who you do not wish to offend. Saying “They were ignorant of most of the laws of physics” means that the people in question did not have a specific body of learning. Saying “You are an ignorant person” is possibly describing someone as primitive, crude, or uncivilized.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignorant

I'm going to resist the temptation to call the original author ignorant since I don't want to spawn some sort of infinitely recursive ignorance-accusation chain. Instead, I'll call him unintentionally rude.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#19

Post by iplusplus »

shawn wrote: post #5

Meanwhile, I ported Arc to JS: https://imgur.com/0Ba0NZN If LN turns into anything, it'll be because of Lisp, not in spite of it. It really doesn't matter that the world is phobic to it when you alone are the blacksmith. One could argue "See? It's running in JS. Doesn't that mean Lisp is useless?" Maybe. But macros are a thing. And when you can generate React on the fly, without having to make a class for every singl…

FWIW, React is a built-in feature of the new Arc-in-JS port. Here's how it looks:

  ( href: "https://news.ycombinator.com" "Hacker News")
That lets you merge s-expression syntax with React syntax quite nicely.

  (
    (
      ( width: "100%" "Hello, world")))
Here's the output of a REPL session.

  $ rlwrap bin/lumen-node

  > (load "arc.l")

  > (print:compile:expand '( href: "https://news.ycombinator.com" "Hacker News"))
  React.createElement("a", {href: "https://news.ycombinator.com"}, "Hacker News")

  > (print:html ( href: "https://news.ycombinator.com" "Hacker News"))
  Hacker News

  > (print:html ( ( ( width: "100%" "Hello, world"))))
  Hello, world

  > (print:html (whitepage "Look ma, no Racket"))
  Warning: Each child in an array or iterator should have a unique "key" prop.

  Check the top-level render call using . See https://fb.me/react-warning-keys for more information.
    in body

  Look ma, no Racket
You can see it's actually JS, since you get all the same warnings that you'd normally get in a node repl. (It's literally running on Node.)

And (print:html (msgpage 'shawn toofast*)) spits out a page saying "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

I find it much easier to generate HTML than traditional methods, and much more maintainable. But it's not fair to claim that something new is inherently better. Time will tell.

I'm most interested in any unexpected warts, but there don't seem to be any so far.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#20

Post by ArchTypical »

johan_larson wrote: post #18

> BTW, ignorant is not a pejorative term. If you think it is you are ignorant and you need to go look the word up in a dictionary. Did that. The Merriam-Webster, in fact. Here's what they said: > There are several meanings of ignorant, all of which are concerned with a lack of knowledge in some sense; some of these are more insulting than others, and care should be exercised before applying this word to people who yo…

> some of these are more insulting than others, and care should be exercised before applying this word to people who you do not wish to offend

This is not in the definition. Please try to stay honest when chastising someone for not being accurate.

> a : destitute of knowledge or education

> also : lacking knowledge or comprehension of the thing specified

> b : resulting from or showing lack of knowledge or intelligence

Post reply on HN