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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#111

Post by hashmap »

geocar wrote: post #31
hashmap wrote: post #11

> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension. Show me. Specifically, material outcomes that I will care about.

What do you care about? There are quite a few programmers who say lisp led to early retirement. That was a pretty interesting idea to me. I like going to the beach a lot. I am not so sure about people who don’t want to get done: if you like doing what the ticket says instead of the other way around lisp probably isn’t going to be something you’re interested in.

"Lisp makes people rich, and I love being rich. Using Lisp actually can't help but make you rich. But I can't actually provide any examples of that happening or how they might translate to anyone else. Get so rich with Lisp. Lisp."

Show me!

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#113

Post by ErroneousBosh »

miohtama wrote: post #38
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

I have several decades of programming experience and would never choose Lisp, unless for funny one pagers. Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.

Sadly, much as I love Forth, it's kind of the same thing. It's an awesome language and it's a great way to bring up bare metal to a functional state, but who does that these days?

I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and everyone just uses Lua anyway, so Lua it is.

Which is a pity, because I like Forth, and I used to to create possibly the nerdiest project on Github. I like Forth a lot, and I'd encourage anyone curious about how you get from "chunk of thinking sand and copper" to "thing I can type commands in" to have a crack at it - it's easy enough to implement your own, just to see how it's done.

But I don't expect anyone else to jump up and like it too, just because I said it's cool.

Well, maybe one or two of you will?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#114

Post by anthk »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #23

A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness. This is a profound misapp…

PicoLisp exists for microcontrollers.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#115

Post by lelanthran »

mlinhares wrote: post #89
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Most of the time when someone adds these fancy languages what happens is that they leave and the ones left are the ones that have to deal with the shit that was produced. I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolut…

> exoteric

Best typo ever! Portmanteau of esoteric and exotic :-)

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#116

Post by chamomeal »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95
christophilus wrote: post #92

In the pro-macro camp, if languages like JS had macros, the language could be kept much simpler, leaving things like pipeline operators, async / await, etc to developers. In the anti-macro camp, they’re hard to write, reason about, and debug stack traces. They are also tempting to use when you shouldn’t, and I think a lot of software shops would run into trouble with them. Regarding Clojure, I wouldn’t call Clojure a…

> Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go. Why is that? Never understood the complaint about slow Clojure startup time. Usually the context is either your local development environment, where you start the process once until you're done for the day, or you're deploying on a server and 5 seconds vs 10 seconds doesn't make that big of an impact. Sh…

I also understand this is an issue for a lot of people but it’s never been an issue for me! I wouldn’t want it for serverless stuff I guess. But I would never think to do that lol

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#117

Post by chamomeal »

chihuahua wrote: post #39
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #23

A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness. This is a profound misapp…

It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions. Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp. Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the s…

For me macros are a power user tool that are useful in libraries to seriously upgrade UX of your public functions. Kinda like how crazy complex typescript generics can seriously upgrade the UX of your lib.

It’s hard to explain without explaining a bunch of what a specific library does. But many clojure libraries expose macros that let you interact with them in much more readable/terse ways.

I’m on my phone but a good one to google is core.logic. It exposes a macro to define a “logic function”, which lets you define logical expressions using pattern matching. You can come up with rules that would be many more LOC and less readable as a normal function. You can of course define them as a normal function too, which is useful when the pattern matching doesn’t express the problem well!

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#118

Post by DeadEarnest »

nine_k wrote: post #19
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript. Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mu…

If we approach the question as engineers, scientifically, with numbers and studies, not anecdotes and hand-waving, then Clojure is hands down the best language in terms of productivity and bug reduction.

To this day, I know of no study that was able to demonstrate superiority of statically-typed languages - [1].

What studies clearly show, is that both in terms of productivity [2] and bug reduction [3], expressivity reigns supreme.

And Clojure is the most expressive [4] out of languages that can leverage huge ecosystems (Java and JS, soon C++ through Jank dialect).

[1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] PBX study from Economics of Software Quality by Caper Jones [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220 [4] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languag...

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#119

Post by 1718627440 »

ruricolist wrote: post #24
chromaton wrote: post #15

Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.

The sketch here would be that Lisps used to be exceptionally resource-intensive, allowing closer-to-metal languages to proliferate and become the default. But nowadays even Common Lisp is a simple and lightweight language next to say Python or C++. Still it's hard to overcome the inertia of the past's massive investments in education in less abstraction-friendly languages.

And a C compiler transforms the code into something very lisp-like (SSA).

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#120

Post by hulitu »

> Learning new dimensions > You can’t persuade someone in 2D with 3D arguments. This is exactly like how in Flatland the sphere is unable to get the square to comprehend what “up” and “down” mean.

Just like today's UX designers who need a 3D surface to draw a lousy rectangle.

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