Running Lisp in Production • Hacker News Board

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#111

Post by bitsai » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

dfischer wrote: post #104

bitsai wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vote that it's worthwhile as well. We've been using Clojure full-time at ReadyForZero for over 3 years now (for web-dev as well as other tasks), and are very happy with our choice.

Have you ever used anything like rails? I come from that background and clojure doesn't seem as straight forward; for better or worse. But I like the beauty of the language.

Mmm, I've never used Ruby or Rails professionally, so I can't really speak to that. Prior to Clojure, I mostly worked with C++, Java, C#, and Python.

At its core, Clojure is basically just data and functions. Once the switch flipped in my mind, I found that to be simpler and more straight forward than any of the languages I worked with before.

When the majority of your code is side-effect-free, pure functions (and Clojure makes it very easy to structure your code this way), it becomes very easy to reason about. And very easy to test, with minimal ceremony!

P.S. When I was learning Clojure, I kinda devoured all the resources I could find. A couple interesting looks at the language from the perspective of Rubyists:

http://briancarper.net/blog/536/clojure-from-a-ruby-perspect...

http://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2009-clojure-for-ruby-pro...

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#112

Post by vseloved » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 3:54 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #84

vseloved wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reference to upstart in the article. We have played with demonizing SBCL (there are a couple of projects out there), but then Grammarly as a whole moved to upstart-based deployments. They are really easy to manage: basically, you just give it a normal (Lisp) script.

Something I need to get around to doing is playing with Docker and SBCL - it gives you daemonization out of the box. Have you tried that?

Yes, we're in the process of moving to docker-based deployments now. In fact, we already have ClozureCL running inside docker, but haven't yet done the same for SBCL. TBD soon :)

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#113

Post by dkvasnicka » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 8:01 PM UTC

eruditely wrote: post #65

Why not racket?

I was thinking the same question and the reply would probably be "performance". I don't think untyped Racket can currently compete with SBCL and I'm not sure they'd be interested in Typed Racket. But I'd love to be proven wrong on both of those things ;)

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#114

Post by dkvasnicka » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

jarcane wrote: post #108

digaozao wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I don't know if it fits what you want. But there is something like that for clojure[0] . I liked the language a lot. I didn't have the chance to use it in production yet. Another option is hacker rank with challenges [1] [0] https://www.4clojure.com/ [1] https://www.hackerrank.com/

http://exercism.io supports Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp, plus a ton of others, and runs through a neat little CLI app locally, so you can use your own editor (I've been doing Rust challenges in Emacs, frex.) http://www.codewars.com/ also supports Clojure, and Haskell, which is not a Lisp but is FP. Hacker Rank pretty much supports everything, but the reason for this is that it handles all the tests t…

Well, that stdio thing is actually what I love about Hacker Rank :) I don't think the boilerplate code is a problem, if you use a reasonable language. Racket is a pleasure to use over there, Clojure slightly less so but wouldn't call it irritating...

But yeah, I've seen some Java solutions on HR...

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#115

Post by jarcane » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

dkvasnicka wrote: post #114

jarcane wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://exercism.io supports Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp, plus a ton of others, and runs through a neat little CLI app locally, so you can use your own editor (I've been doing Rust challenges in Emacs, frex.) http://www.codewars.com/ also supports Clojure, and Haskell, which is not a Lisp but is FP. Hacker Rank pretty much supports everything, but the reason for this is that it handles all the tests t…

Well, that stdio thing is actually what I love about Hacker Rank :) I don't think the boilerplate code is a problem, if you use a reasonable language. Racket is a pleasure to use over there, Clojure slightly less so but wouldn't call it irritating... But yeah, I've seen some Java solutions on HR...

I just wind up getting irritated having to rewrite the same code all the time. Some popular languages will generally come with a pre-filled template with the I/O already covered, but quite a lot of the FP stuff didn't.

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#116

Post by eruditely » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 10:04 PM UTC

dkvasnicka wrote: post #113

eruditely wrote: post #65

Why not racket?

I was thinking the same question and the reply would probably be "performance". I don't think untyped Racket can currently compete with SBCL and I'm not sure they'd be interested in Typed Racket. But I'd love to be proven wrong on both of those things ;)

Ok that makes sense.

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#117

Post by doomrobo » Sat, Jun 27, 2015, 10:32 PM UTC

Syssiphus wrote: post #101

doomrobo wrote: post #90

Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know of a kind of "LISP Challange" set? I recently started the Matasano challenges[0] and I found them really well-suited to my style of learning (learning by doing and expanding by reading relevant material, enabled by my own internal motivation). Is there anything like that that has a relatively small set of condensed yet rich challenges that demonstrate key elements from LISPy…

From the top of my head..: The Praetorian Bootcamp challenges are similar to the Matasano ones: https://www.praetorian.com/challenges/ Lisp Koans: https://github.com/google/lisp-koans Project Euler: https://projecteuler.net/ Exercism: http://exercism.io/ 99 Lisp Problems: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

the Lisp Koans, Exercism, and 99 Lisp problems look especially good for FP concepts (and the first two are more modern than I had expected). Thanks!

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#118

Post by vseloved » Sun, Jun 28, 2015, 6:12 AM UTC

eruditely wrote: post #116

dkvasnicka wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same question and the reply would probably be "performance". I don't think untyped Racket can currently compete with SBCL and I'm not sure they'd be interested in Typed Racket. But I'd love to be proven wrong on both of those things ;)

Ok that makes sense.

But that's not the reason. Personally I find Lisp superior in most respects, but I don't think it's a good place and time to argue on Lisp vs Racket and similar topics.

Re: Running Lisp in Production

#119

Post by monkeyshelli » Sun, Jun 28, 2015, 8:21 AM UTC

Syssiphus wrote: post #101

doomrobo wrote: post #90

Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know of a kind of "LISP Challange" set? I recently started the Matasano challenges[0] and I found them really well-suited to my style of learning (learning by doing and expanding by reading relevant material, enabled by my own internal motivation). Is there anything like that that has a relatively small set of condensed yet rich challenges that demonstrate key elements from LISPy…

From the top of my head..: The Praetorian Bootcamp challenges are similar to the Matasano ones: https://www.praetorian.com/challenges/ Lisp Koans: https://github.com/google/lisp-koans Project Euler: https://projecteuler.net/ Exercism: http://exercism.io/ 99 Lisp Problems: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

I've been using python-koans to teach Python, but the thought of looking for lisp-koans from Github didn't even cross my mind now as I personally started learning CL. Thanks for these excellent links!