There is something very playful about lisp that is so intriguing to me. I've come to rely heavily on powerful type systems at work (which is amazing), but lisp feels like unbounded imagination flowing at my fingertips.
It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
101–110 of 346 posts
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The repls you mention are not like lisp repls. You're being downvoted because your comment makes it sound like you've never programmed a lisp but have strong opinions nonetheless.
>you've never programmed a lisp but have strong opinions nonetheless i've written racket and clojure (and mathematica, which is a lisp). not multiple 10kloc but enough to understand what the big ideas are. claiming i just haven't written enough lisp is basically the logical fallacy of assuming the premise.
> “mathematica is a lisp”
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#103I use Clojure at work but wow do I miss just about everything about Common Lisp whenever I have to debug anything or want performant code. Being able to be in nested errors and click at any part of the stack to inspect lexical bindings is extremely useful, and more importantly, clicking on an object then pushing M- to copy it to my REPL is much nicer than what Clojure offers (tap>, which I consider a glorified pretty…
This nicely summarizes some of my frustrations with using Clojure for my master's thesis. I'm not unhappy with the choice. Clojure allows such a juicy crossover between "everything is a key-value map, mannn" and "If it has :quack key set to true, treat it like a duck" which works really well for entity-component-system game-design-y things.
but the development story in Common Lisp ... and my gawd, the CONDITION SYSTEM ... were things that I sorely missed for the last year. and I'm not even that experienced of a CL hacker. It just grew on me so quickly. If only CLOS and the primitive data types in CL played together more nicely than they seem to.
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
>you've never programmed a lisp but have strong opinions nonetheless i've written racket and clojure (and mathematica, which is a lisp). not multiple 10kloc but enough to understand what the big ideas are. claiming i just haven't written enough lisp is basically the logical fallacy of assuming the premise.
> “mathematica is a lisp”
http://xahlee.info/M/lisp_root_of_wolfram_lang.html
http://xahlee.info/M/lisp_vs_WolframLang.html
> WolframLang has all the characteristics of LISP:
seems you either don't know what lisp is or you've never written mathematica
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#105There are plenty of old business systems which are critical, can't be removed or turned off, and use LISP, COBOL, etc. Meanwhile, nothing important uses Clojure or other trendy flash-in-the-pan language. If you want an interesting project, sure, use Clojure or something. If you want money, learn COBOL.
If we're gonna go off what has the most businesses built on it, LISP wouldn't even be in the top 20
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#106Big fan of Lispworks (Yes, there is a free version). Using it in production, as many others. Using Quicklisp in experiments. Not direct in my codebase. Lisp will always be there. Learning Lisp will make you a better programmer, while having fun.
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “mathematica is a lisp”
http://xahlee.info/M/lisp_root_of_wolfram_lang.html http://xahlee.info/M/lisp_vs_WolframLang.html > WolframLang has all the characteristics of LISP: seems you either don't know what lisp is or you've never written mathematica
> "seems you either don't know what lisp or you've never written mathematica"
Meanwhile, you brought up examples from Mathematica docs that talk about head/tails (car/cdr) but by that logic, Python is a Lisp too because you have:
list[0]
list[1:]
"Mathematica expressions are in many respects like LISP lists. In Mathematica, however, expressions are the lowest-level objects accessible to the user. LISP allows you to go below lists, and access the binary trees from which they are built."
That right there is telling you that Mathematica is not a Lisp.
Edit: Corrected the Python list example.
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of languages that are not lisp have this ability.
I don’t think that they do. I know that Erlang has something similar; you can reload a module and it will gradually replace the old code as processes are replaced. In principle you could debug a single thread in a C (or C++) program without stopping the others, and some IDEs will let you edit the code and recompile while the program is running (they patch out the old function definition so that it jumps to the new on…
Said "software on satellite" story is from Ron Garret, for anyone interested.
https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
> During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#109I see a lot of “coding” talk in the blog and comments from the author here, but few mentions as to what kind of software they’re building or what use cases they’re targeting. My hot take is that the reason functional programming never took off is that, while it certainly is fine for writing programs, most software these days is not “program running locally on my pc/server from the command line until it completes” and…
It took me a while to grok monads, and the IO monad, and longer still to figure out how to compose them in safe ways, and manipulate execution order, etc. But: now I can write typesafe applications, and I produce fewer bugs when I work in non-FP languages (I get paid to write Java.) Lisp is a starting point. Haskell is where it's at. I recommend learning the style, even if you never produce production code in it.
Yes, Haskell is magnificent for learning FP. I used to think Haskell was terrible for IO, but my tune has changed dramatically since I started working with it full time.
Re: It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
#110There are plenty of old business systems which are critical, can't be removed or turned off, and use LISP, COBOL, etc. Meanwhile, nothing important uses Clojure or other trendy flash-in-the-pan language. If you want an interesting project, sure, use Clojure or something. If you want money, learn COBOL.
I hear this a lot, but have never once seen a COBOL job posting.
That's because gigs in trendy languages come and go, and you might earn good pay for six months, whereas cobol gigs run for 20 years and pay consistently high salaries.