Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11302125
Lisp Flavoured Erlang
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not compiling to JVM. LFE compiles to BEAM.
From the docs I understand that it is interpreted and runs on erlang vm. I did not find anywhere that lfe code is compiled.
The LFE compiler is referenced deeper in the documentation[1]. I also had to hunt to answer that question after the tutorial gave an example of compiling one of the example modules.
[1] https://github.com/rvirding/lfe/blob/develop/doc/lfe_comp.tx...
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a fan of clojure. I'm interested in LFE, but I've been focussing on learning Haskell lately, and don't want to switch gears yet. The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. That combined with their immutability (yet easy t…
> The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. I'm not sure I understand. Why do you miss them when you have them in Clojure? Is it a typo and you meant to say LFE? By the way one of my biggest productivity boost for me is the h…
I think (s)he meant that they are a feature in clojure that is missed in LFE. The sentence construction is a bit off, but I read it as "[I miss](in LFE)[in clojure are the data structures]". That is, the "in clojure" is the data structures, not where it is missed.
But its more likely to be a typo :-)
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#24As a Clojure fan, I tried using this, but I got the impression it has learned next to nothing from Clojure, so I ended up going with Elixir instead. Particularly: - No data structure literals (?) - (except e.g., '(1 2 3) for lists) - Manual module exports, instead of just having 2 versions of def - Other small syntactic annoyances, like plain parens everywhere, instead of brackets in some cases like Clojure, and atom…
Why assume every new lisp should borrow from Clojure? I think the extra parens types are annoying and unnecessary, personally. Clojure is pretty different from most lisps, maybe lfe is going for wider appeal?
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#25As a Clojure fan, I tried using this, but I got the impression it has learned next to nothing from Clojure, so I ended up going with Elixir instead. Particularly: - No data structure literals (?) - (except e.g., '(1 2 3) for lists) - Manual module exports, instead of just having 2 versions of def - Other small syntactic annoyances, like plain parens everywhere, instead of brackets in some cases like Clojure, and atom…
Why assume every new lisp should borrow from Clojure? I think the extra parens types are annoying and unnecessary, personally. Clojure is pretty different from most lisps, maybe lfe is going for wider appeal?
I can't prove that it should. Just providing a list of initial impressions from someone who has been using Clojure for a while, FWIW. It's necessarily subjective.
Seems like it would be a good idea though, since Clojure is a new lisp that has gotten a decent amount of traction in industry.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. I'm not sure I understand. Why do you miss them when you have them in Clojure? Is it a typo and you meant to say LFE? By the way one of my biggest productivity boost for me is the h…
I think (s)he meant that they are a feature in clojure that is missed in LFE. The sentence construction is a bit off, but I read it as "[I miss](in LFE)[in clojure are the data structures]". That is, the "in clojure" is the data structures, not where it is missed. But its more likely to be a typo :-)
That's what I thought but I wanted to make sure... :)
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#27I think it would be nice to see some comparison to Clojure for example which is a JVM-integrated lisp-1. I have for example Elixir on my radar for a while but I'm very interested in seeing more lisp dialects running on popular VM implementations. My point is that I don't know how to compare this to Clojure (in my case). What advantages does it have and why should I use it?
I am a fan of clojure. I'm interested in LFE, but I've been focussing on learning Haskell lately, and don't want to switch gears yet. The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. That combined with their immutability (yet easy t…
> Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure.
You don't use vectors very much on the BEAM in general, so I wouldn't consider this very important. Maps are more popular, but have a complicated relationship with records and records have, due to historical reasons, not seen much light on the BEAM in general until lately.
Tuples, which you could use as vectors, sort of, can be written as follows:
(tuple 'hey 'ho "let's go") #(hey ho "let's go")
Tuples are infinitely more important than maps on the BEAM and so they deserve special syntax.
I think insisting that everything should be like Clojure is a great way to not really see anything different. While I understand that your idea is that "everything else should see what's so great about Clojure", maybe you could take that to heart as well.
Edit, addition: I wonder what the stats on posts starting with "I'm/As a Clojure fan..." are. If someone is an Archlinux user, a vegan, a crossfitter and a Clojure user, which do they tell you first?
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why assume every new lisp should borrow from Clojure? I think the extra parens types are annoying and unnecessary, personally. Clojure is pretty different from most lisps, maybe lfe is going for wider appeal?
I can't prove that it should. Just providing a list of initial impressions from someone who has been using Clojure for a while, FWIW. It's necessarily subjective. Seems like it would be a good idea though, since Clojure is a new lisp that has gotten a decent amount of traction in industry.
I think a lot of that has to do with Java interop. I could be wrong but IMO the language features people rave about are all balanced by warts. I like Clj and I like CL and many Schemes. Diversity is cool.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#29That cup of coffee in the logo suggests they are compiling to the Java JVM. If true, this makes me wonder why aren't they using Erlang itself as a target?
I've only recently become a coffee drinker, but if someone gives me purple coffee, I'm not drinking it! We didn't even have purple coffee at Yahoo! I think that's tea.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the docs I understand that it is interpreted and runs on erlang vm. I did not find anywhere that lfe code is compiled.
The LFE compiler is referenced deeper in the documentation[1]. I also had to hunt to answer that question after the tutorial gave an example of compiling one of the example modules. [1] https://github.com/rvirding/lfe/blob/develop/doc/lfe_comp.tx...
Erlang, LFE, and Elixir are all compiled languages, yes.
Having said that, they all support interactivity via a shell, including dynamically defining functions and tweaking the runtime. LFE does a better job at functions than Erlang; I'd wager Elixir too, but haven't looked closely at it.