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Why I still Lisp

mendhekar.medium.com

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Re: Why I still Lisp

#171

Post by blackrock »

mumblemumble wrote: post #53
cle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’ve seen just as many disastrous codebases written in highly structured, statically typed languages. Any language with intrinsically interesting features tends to attract inexperienced (or just bad) developers who don’t appreciate the tradeoffs of their tools and design decisions, and think the tool is a panacea. This leads to disastrous codebases, and is not at all limited to lisps or dynamically typed lan…

I 100% agree that disastrous codebases are every bit as likely in other languages. But it somehow hurts more in a lisp. I think that the syntax really is the culprit. In a language like Java, the Byzantine syntax and semantics enforce some minimum level of structure on the code. It's not much, but it's something, just enough to give an experienced programmer a few extra heuristics they can use to make sense of what t…

> In a Lisp, though, everything looks more-or-less homogeneous. ... you can't quickly tell whether some thing you're looking at is data, a function, or a macro, or what. It all blends together into a disorienting fog.

I wonder if this is a feature of Lisp, instead of a defect.

When you call up a variable or a function or macro, the intent is to return some kind of result. If variables, functions, and macros all look alike, and then maybe it can be weaved more seamlessly into the code to create its own style.

You can also think of a variable, as a function call with zero parameters.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#172

Post by yawaramin »

continuational wrote: post #65

Lots of articles like this out there about Lisp. To quote Linus Thorvalds: > Talk is cheap, show me the code If you think you can write better code in Lisp, well, show us some examples of that.

OK, here's an example: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fkt-t...

In this paper the authors describe how students actually grasped fundamental concepts better in Schema than in Java, despite being taught both throughout the course of the semester.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#173

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #165
kazinator wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, C is statically typed, so if you're arguing for static typing as the cure for security holes, citing C examples of security hoes won't speak well for your argument Secondly, C has an incomplete static system, which has no run-time safety net to compensate for it. Many properties of C programs go unchecked. What is checked is easily defeated with type casts. Even the numeric conversions lack safety; e.g. floa…

OK, now I understand your point. C's static type system is inadequate to prevent C's security issues - that's kind of self-evident, when you put it that way. [Edit: More precisely, C's type system is inadequate to prevent the kinds of security errors common in C code.] What's your stance on a stronger static type system being able to prevent them?

[deleted]

Re: Why I still Lisp

#174

Post by yawaramin »

didibus wrote: post #117
hota_mazi wrote: post #112

> As a programmer, I carry around invariants (which is a fancy name for properties about things in my program) in my head all the time. The author has probably not worked on large code bases or even in teams. I often forget even my own code's purpose six months after having written it, let alone code written by teams of hundreds of people and millions of lines of code. Dynamically types will kill you in such (common)…

> I started serious programming in my teens in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum+, although I had previously dabbled in (hand-) writing Fortran programs > I ended up studying Programming Languages at Indiana University with Dan Friedman (of The Little Lisper / The Little Schemer fame). It was my introduction to Scheme (and the world of Lisp.) I finally knew that I had found the perfect medium to express my programs in. And it h…

It's possible to have 25 years of experience but if they're the same year repeated 25 times, then it's still a year :-)

Re: Why I still Lisp

#175

Post by [deleted] »

lmilcin wrote: post #8

I think Lisp is going to live forever as a niche tool for people who "get" it. I use Clojure on a daily basis. Not necessarily because it is best Lisp, but rather because I am working with Java applications and being able to reuse the same Java code I have already developed is a huge boon to me. If I was able to choose, I would be using Common Lisp. The way I use it is to quickly develop adhoc tools and PoCs and more…

[deleted]

Re: Why I still Lisp

#176

Post by dmohs »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #68
Abhinav2000 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would shadow binding help create more readable code? (I agree with everything else in your post)

I think it would do that, if in the inner scope, you only need a part of something from the outer scope. Lets say you have a list of things and they have the name according to what they are, lets use "things" as a placeholder. Then in the inner scope, you are still working with "things", just not all of the outer scope, but for reading the code of the inner scope, it does not matter. You are still working with "thing…

Yes it does make renaming harder, but if your compiler warns about unused variables it might save you more often than not.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#177

Post by mbrodersen »

vslira wrote: post #14
lmilcin wrote: post #8

I think Lisp is going to live forever as a niche tool for people who "get" it. I use Clojure on a daily basis. Not necessarily because it is best Lisp, but rather because I am working with Java applications and being able to reuse the same Java code I have already developed is a huge boon to me. If I was able to choose, I would be using Common Lisp. The way I use it is to quickly develop adhoc tools and PoCs and more…

Have you looked at Nubank? Largest neobank in the world by users and valuation, it's a clojure shop to such an extent they literally bought Cognitect No affiliation, just a satisfied customer

There are examples of successful companies using any programming language. It doesn’t prove anything about the quality of the language. The world still succcesfully runs on COBOL. That is not a good enough reason to pick COBOL for your next project.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#178

Post by gugagore »

kazinator wrote: post #111
coldtea wrote: post #17

> I have never had a static type checker (regardless of how sophisticated it is) help me prevent anything more than an obvious error (which should be caught in testing anyway). Obvious in retrospect is not the same as obvious. And such errors happen all the time, the same way without syntax checks typos happen all the time. And "caught in testing" is 2 extra steps removed from caught immediately by the syntax checker…

> And such errors happen all the time, the same way without syntax checks typos happen all the time. No they don't, because syntax is richly varied and nested, even in programs whose "type story" is bland. For instance, in some numerical program, there are lots of opportunities to make typos in the syntax, but the type of just about everything may be either float or else array of float (possiby string , if it has any…

> Note that functions like sin and cos have exactly the same type signature, yet it is disastrous if you mix them up. Static type checking doesn't help.

I agree with you. I am hard-pressed to imagine types (where it's static analysis or anything at all) offering any help in catching inadvertent swaps of sin and cos.

One thing that types could help with is avoiding confusion between e.g. radians and degrees. Even this I believe is quite a challenge, because the quintessential (in my opinion) example of static analysis and types as they arise in science and engineering, the SI units and dimensional analysis, take radians to be dimensionless and therefore do not distinguish the input and the output types of e.g. sin (Radians).

I personally believe this problem is rectifiable beyond the SI type system (or who knows, within it), but not at no cost. I believe the choice to not distinguish the input and output types of e.g. sin (Radians) is rooted in many different practical considerations, and points to the difficulty of formalizing types in practice.

> Test cases are therefore static checks.

I don't agree with this unless you are talking about tests that perform some kind of symbolic execution / static analysis within them. What static analysis grants you is checking a "for all x" claim, without literally checking each x. You can argue that for any given static analysis system, the kinds of claims it lets you check are not that useful in practice, and I would agree in many situations. But having a finite number of test cases that tests some x is not the same as testing for all x.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#179

Post by mbrodersen »

madmax96 wrote: post #66
dack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What thing that violates a type check would be "perfectly fine to do"? One good example is where you might treat records or "product types" as maps Let's say you want to write a function that can capitalize all the string fields in the object passed in. In a dynamic language, you could map over the values and apply capitalization trivially. It would be a one-liner. In a static language, you'd have a few options, bu…

There is no limit on the number of problems easier to solve using dynamically typed languages. For an individual hacker, dynamically typed languages make a lot of sense. I don't forget what types my functions accept as I am writing a program. All static typing can accomplish is slow me down when I'm trying to bang out something. This is why Python (for instance) is loved by data scientists, researchers, and startups.…

> There is no limit on the number of problems easier to solve using dynamically typed languages

40+ years of programming experience here + a language geek. I have for years programmed in both dynamic and static languages to find out what works best for me. My conclusion is that problems are easier to solve with statically typed languages. So clearly different languages works for different personalities.

Re: Why I still Lisp

#180

Post by mbrodersen »

didibus wrote: post #117
hota_mazi wrote: post #112

> As a programmer, I carry around invariants (which is a fancy name for properties about things in my program) in my head all the time. The author has probably not worked on large code bases or even in teams. I often forget even my own code's purpose six months after having written it, let alone code written by teams of hundreds of people and millions of lines of code. Dynamically types will kill you in such (common)…

> I started serious programming in my teens in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum+, although I had previously dabbled in (hand-) writing Fortran programs > I ended up studying Programming Languages at Indiana University with Dan Friedman (of The Little Lisper / The Little Schemer fame). It was my introduction to Scheme (and the world of Lisp.) I finally knew that I had found the perfect medium to express my programs in. And it h…

I have 25+ years of professional experience and disagree with the author.
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