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

I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

maplant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#11

Post by nine_k »

maplant wrote: post #3
0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

I think people underestimate how pragmatic meta programming can be because there are some obvious downsides. Arguably one of things that made Rust so popular was its inclusion of procedural macros. But beyond that the thing I don't understand about the modern hate towards macros is that they are simply very fun.

Ruby, Python, and Typescript use metaprogramming rather heavily. They lack the homoiconic property of lisps, but they can do both higher-order functions and monkey-patching.

Meta-heavy code usually offers a nice DSL, but is proportionally harder to drill down through.

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#12

Post by harperlee »

0xcafefood wrote: post #9
reikonomusha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically): - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished. - There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written…

Agreed. I think Clojure strikes a pretty reasonable balance here. It's opinionated about the programming paradigm, scales back some of the pain that comes from reader macros, and solves some of the bootstrapping problems by compatibility with other JVM languages.

I love clojure but the points still stand, kind-of.

  - There is Calva for VS Code but the community default is emacs and cider
  - How many programs in apt or brew are written in clojure? I'd concede that the community is great and focused on productivity, but it's so niche that you don't see much work out there made in clojure, and there is also a vestigial lisp sentiment to prefer building your own library from scratch instead of contributing to a standard library, which spreads  the efforts of a small community too much
  - Third one you need to mutate it a little bit: clojure is opinionated instead of having "so many ways", but its opinions, while great, are foreign to most programmers

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#13

Post by reddit_clone »

reikonomusha wrote: post #8
0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically): - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished. - There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written…

Well CL is supposedly the programmable programming language. So none of this is surprising..

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#14

Post by fmbb »

shpongled wrote: post #4
maplant wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate how pragmatic meta programming can be because there are some obvious downsides. Arguably one of things that made Rust so popular was its inclusion of procedural macros. But beyond that the thing I don't understand about the modern hate towards macros is that they are simply very fun.

As someone who is "into" programming languages (and making toy implementations of them), I think some of the most important macros are along the lines of Rust/Haskells `derive/deriving` for quickly enabling serialization, printing etc. Using a language without such capability quickly becomes frustrating once you move to any kind of "real" task.

In any kind of real task, serialization is not the hard part.

If you can write a meta program for it, you can execute that in CI and spit out generated code and be done with it. This is a viable approach in any programming language that can print strings to files.

It’s not frustrating, but maybe it feels tacky. But then you shrug and move on to the real task at hand.

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#15

Post by nxobject »

Another reason this is interesting beyond "Lispiness" instead: implementing a (compliant) Scheme takes on some interesting problems that other languages punt - proper tail recursion, delimited continuations (off the top of my head, I don't know other methods apart from CPS), and hygienic macros.

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#16

Post by renato_shira »

0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

[flagged]

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#17

Post by pjmlp »

maplant wrote: post #3
0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

I think people underestimate how pragmatic meta programming can be because there are some obvious downsides. Arguably one of things that made Rust so popular was its inclusion of procedural macros. But beyond that the thing I don't understand about the modern hate towards macros is that they are simply very fun.

And yet we have done it across most modern languages, with a lesser experience as Common Lisp or Scheme.

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#18

Post by nocman »

reikonomusha wrote: post #8
0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically): - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished. - There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written…

> - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished.

Can you give specific examples of "what a typical user expects" that are missing from Emacs-based programming environments (SLIME, and/or others)? I'm not suggesting there aren't any, I'd just like to know your list.

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#19

Post by vindarel »

reikonomusha wrote: post #8
0xcafefood wrote: post #2

I really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language. Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do…

Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically): - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished. - There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written…

New projects are making the newcomer experience easier:

- ICL https://github.com/atgreen/icl/ a full featured REPL in the terminal and the browser.

- JSCL's playground 100% in the browser https://wiki3-ai.github.io/jscl-kernel/ (very new)

- constantly new editor plugins. A new one: Zed https://github.com/etyurkin/zed-cl (all editors, for readers, including VSCode, Pulsar etc: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Those editors appeared in recent years. So, I see a good trend in the ecosystem).

Re: I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

#20

Post by saghm »

reikonomusha wrote: post #10
cultofmetatron wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it seems uncommon for people to want to do that. It becomes more obvious once you start managing developers vs being a solo dev. everyone making their own designer means the language can morph into a completely insular creation with a learning curve that expands exponentially with every new hire. A little extra boilerplate is the cost of standardized idioms that work across both your codebase that your new hire…

This is a common reaction/belief but usually from people who have not actually managed a team of Lisp devs. Lisp devs are managed in the same way as any other: You have style guidelines, design review, code review, etc. Sometimes a new macro is good and vastly simplifies code. It's accepted as a PR and documented like anything else. Sometimes a new macro is bad, and it's promptly rejected by the team. It's a persiste…

It's hard to reconcile that with the comment they were responding to that claimed that lisp requires you to be the designer of the language a bit. I don't know enough to know who is right, but if the majority of the code is "just" regular functions and classes then I'd argue that it doesn't require custom design as a much as allow it, and the solution you're proposing is to mostly disallow it by convention. Like the comment you're responding to suggests, it's hard for me to imagine why having that much flexibility is worthwhile if it's going to be mostly unused when you can still write that occasional macro you call out in Rust or Elixir.
Post reply on HN