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The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

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Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#31

Post by anonzzzies »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #24
wk_end wrote: post #12

Apologies for donning my grumpy old man hat. I like CL as much as the average dev who's dabbled with it on weekends but can't find anyone to pay me to use it, but...this essay really adds so little to the conversation about it. There's not an awful lot explicitly wrong in it per se, but people have been writing these little puff pieces on their blogs about Lisp for (at least) twenty years now. This checks all the usu…

OP hasn't even really used Lisp in anger, yet This struck me, too. My current hobby project is in Go and I'm really quite enjoying it. It doesn't feel "soulless" to me at all. That said, I'm well aware that my opinion may be different if I had to write Go for a living instead of just for fun.

I use Go too; I am an old guy and I like C; go reminds me of it. I don't have to remember anything; I can just dev with it without internet if need be. But I can also do that with CL and then, well, everything is better. For me anyway.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ivanlinux wrote: post #29

This is exactly why I exclusively write Perl, C, and Lisp, simply they are fun to write, and provide me with the capabilities to feel powerful as a developer. Most software written these days lands in languages that make me feel like a drone, endlessly fighting a system in place or a pattern for some arbitrary theoretical gain that is never realized in the real world anyways, OOP, Type-Systems, FP, whatever, why woul…

> On side note, they say that 80% of developers are unhappy, do we think that languages have a big part in this?

Between languages, managers, and processes as sources of unhappiness, I personally would expect languages to come in third.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#33

Post by monsieurbanana »

netbioserror wrote: post #17
monsieurbanana wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe because it's easy to decouple data from operations on that data, even if stateful You can use objects in C++ and Java without mixing code and data (by having data-only and code-only classes for example). I haven't fully read it, but there's a book from a clojure developer about about this: https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming The book itself uses Java, not Clojure.

I know Java programmers use static-method classes, which are just like modules in newer languages. Which just further illustrates the point. It's a hack on top of a language that requires everything to be defined inside of a class. That layer of abstraction on top of things that could be much simpler kills understanding. It massively complicates answering the question "What even is a class?" for a learner. I also rea…

I didn't expect that much negativity regarding my comment, I never implied you need to "git gud".

I'm happy in my Clojure job and I would rather not work with OO languages, and that's definitely not how they're taught, but if/when you're forced to use them you can choose not to follow the traditional way and instead write them in a more functional/data oriented way.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#34

Post by ds9soft »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #26

A PG article about "doing what you love" was recently shared and discussed on HN [1], and I think a lot of the same logic applies. The nature of a job is that someone is paying you to do what they want you to do. If we're talking about what makes you happy in your free time, then sure, learn any obscure language that appeals to you. If you find something cool that you can do in CL and nowhere else, that's an amazing…

I didn't give any career advice at all. Why did you think this was it? My career advice would be to keep developing in whatever established and practical language you are using and get paid to use if that's what you want.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#35

Post by ilc »

wglb wrote: post #11

Having programmed professionally in 36 languages, I must agree with this. I am having so much fun with Lisp, that I am not likely to go back. > Often developers say how you can make a mess of a Common Lisp codebase because of such freedom it provides. But isn’t that the same with any language? There is a story about the code behind the terminal interface for Tops-10 for the PDO-10. It had been tweaked over the years…

I wish you could use Genera. If you like emacs/slime. You would see how much we lost :(

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#36

Post by efilife »

wglb wrote: post #16
anthk wrote: post #7

Two books, for beginners and experts: - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Get both the book and the figures. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/ebf/59f74a93bbc1435c... Get SBCL as the compiler/interpreter, it's the fastest FLOSS one. Portacle has everything to begin with minus t…

This is cool.

Why is this downvoted

Not anymore, I balanced it out

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#37

Post by ivanlinux »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #32
ivanlinux wrote: post #29

This is exactly why I exclusively write Perl, C, and Lisp, simply they are fun to write, and provide me with the capabilities to feel powerful as a developer. Most software written these days lands in languages that make me feel like a drone, endlessly fighting a system in place or a pattern for some arbitrary theoretical gain that is never realized in the real world anyways, OOP, Type-Systems, FP, whatever, why woul…

> On side note, they say that 80% of developers are unhappy, do we think that languages have a big part in this? Between languages, managers, and processes as sources of unhappiness, I personally would expect languages to come in third.

I think that these practices are almost always tied to languages though. For instance I've never worked at a Java shop that wasn't an overly corporate, manager oriented, scrum/agile mess. Whereas all of the Perl shops have been the extreme opposite. Could be just my experiences, but I see a correlation personally.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#38

Post by dang »

leprechaun1066 wrote: post #30
wk_end wrote: post #12

Apologies for donning my grumpy old man hat. I like CL as much as the average dev who's dabbled with it on weekends but can't find anyone to pay me to use it, but...this essay really adds so little to the conversation about it. There's not an awful lot explicitly wrong in it per se, but people have been writing these little puff pieces on their blogs about Lisp for (at least) twenty years now. This checks all the usu…

Shinmera recently talked about porting SBCL to the switch: https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/437

Discussed here:

Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41530783 - Sept 2024 (81 comments)

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#39

Post by netbioserror »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #33
netbioserror wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Java programmers use static-method classes, which are just like modules in newer languages. Which just further illustrates the point. It's a hack on top of a language that requires everything to be defined inside of a class. That layer of abstraction on top of things that could be much simpler kills understanding. It massively complicates answering the question "What even is a class?" for a learner. I also rea…

I didn't expect that much negativity regarding my comment, I never implied you need to "git gud". I'm happy in my Clojure job and I would rather not work with OO languages, and that's definitely not how they're taught, but if/when you're forced to use them you can choose not to follow the traditional way and instead write them in a more functional/data oriented way.

I didn't intend a negative tone and that's hard to convey in text.

Re: The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp

#40

Post by allknowingfrog »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #24
wk_end wrote: post #12

Apologies for donning my grumpy old man hat. I like CL as much as the average dev who's dabbled with it on weekends but can't find anyone to pay me to use it, but...this essay really adds so little to the conversation about it. There's not an awful lot explicitly wrong in it per se, but people have been writing these little puff pieces on their blogs about Lisp for (at least) twenty years now. This checks all the usu…

OP hasn't even really used Lisp in anger, yet This struck me, too. My current hobby project is in Go and I'm really quite enjoying it. It doesn't feel "soulless" to me at all. That said, I'm well aware that my opinion may be different if I had to write Go for a living instead of just for fun.

I've also been dabbling in Go recently, and I'm finding that the culture surrounding it is one of actually understanding what your code does. My main language is Ruby. It hits many of the same high notes that Lisp programmers talk about, and I enjoy writing it. There's just something about the practical, concrete nature of Go code that appeals to me.
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