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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#31

Post by geocar »

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.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#32

Post by xigoi »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #25
ModernMech wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced. The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really abo…

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

> What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust?

If you only think about programming languages as a way to make money, the analogy of being stuck in Flatland is perfect.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#33

Post by wrs »

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…

On the other hand, it would be easier to add type checking to a Lisp than it was to Python or JavaScript, and I don’t know any technical reason you couldn’t. A little Googling shows it’s been experimented with several times.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#34

Post by wrs »

GMoromisato wrote: post #30

Robust macros allow you to create domain-specific abstractions. That's cool, but there are plenty of other ways. Even functions are a way to create abstractions. And with anonymous functions, you can easily create higher-order abstractions. The only thing AST-level macros help with is creating custom syntax to cut down on boilerplate. That's very cool, but it comes with a cost: now you have to learn new syntax. I lov…

I’m writing a lot of Rust lately, which is rapidly becoming regarded as a conventional language, and I sure do appreciate all those things I use every day that end in exclamation points.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#35

Post by xigoi »

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.

You’re assuming that people choose languages based on merit and not based on how much money someone will give them for using them.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#36

Post by wrs »

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…

“Common, even”? Citation needed. I’ve worked closely with hundreds of developers over the years and maybe two of them made a conscious, knowledgeable choice whether to use Lisp for something.

You’re even sort of making the same point. Specialized problems need specialized tools. How do you write those specialized tools? Start from scratch, or just make a Lisp package?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#37

Post by nathan_compton »

Big lisp guy here. Have written tens of thousands of lines of scheme, at least, and common lisp.

But I don't get this "Lisp is so much better than everything else," thing. It feels very jejune to me.

Most lisp programmers barely use macros and most programming languages these days have most of the features of Lisp that originally made it useful (automatic memory management, repls, dynamic typing*, and even meta-programming if you really want it).

I do think that most common languages are mediocre but mediocrity is just how humans are.

--

If I had one thing I want fixed about Scheme it would be the dynamic typing, especially since many Schemes compile aggressively. Finding bugs is much harder when your apparently dynamic language has compiled out everything useful for understanding an error condition. Most of those mistakes could be caught at compile time.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#38

Post by miohtama »

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.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#39

Post by chihuahua »

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 same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.

In the absence of that, the entire article can be refuted by quoting The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#40

Post by scragz »

xigoi wrote: post #32
libraryofbabel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

> What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust? If you only think about programming languages as a way to make money, the analogy of being stuck in Flatland is perfect.

some people only think about life as a way to make money. unfortunately coding was best-in-slot career for too long and these kinds of people hijacked the culture.
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