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Lisp is still a secret weapon

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Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#41

Post by DonaldFisk »

Scarbutt wrote: post #36
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I wonder if Graham was presented with the same problem today, will he pick a lisp and write everything from scratch or pick up a less "expressive" language because it has a strong and mature ecosystem of libs.

You can have your cake and eat it. It's possible for Lisps to use library code in less expressive languages, such as C, via a variety of mechanisms (foreign function interface, extending the virtual machine, ...). If you want access to Java libraries, you can use Kawa, Clojure, or Armed Bear Common Lisp.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#43

Post by Ericson2314 »

bbcbasic wrote: post #29
bbcbasic wrote: post #12

Lisp? Meh! The real secret is Agda. The real real secret is using a language so obscure that you end up writing the compiler for production use, by studying the compiler that some researcher created for a paper.

The fact I am being downvoted is indicative that I am on to something. Think about it :-)

I think yours is the best response to these sorts of painful-to-read HN threads.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#44

Post by agumonkey »

Scarbutt wrote: post #36
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I wonder if Graham was presented with the same problem today, will he pick a lisp and write everything from scratch or pick up a less "expressive" language because it has a strong and mature ecosystem of libs.

There's a solid trend to do that, Norvig wrote a lot of recent articles in python, colleges are replacing Java with it too. Lisp genes have spread so it's not as alternative as it used to be. That said, SBCL seems to have possibilities and performance unmatched by all the tiny trendy languages of the day (except for v8 maybe and lua maybe).

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#45

Post by MichaelGG »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I doubt this. Looking at some stuff done in C - a ton of time is simply wasted shuffling bytes around and fixing the resulting memory issues.

If your point is that language alone isn't gonna decide much, that's probably mostly right. FB used/uses PHP. Harry Potter was written on pen and paper. I don't think either is much of an argument about tools.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#46

Post by tangled »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #35
agumonkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes hand in hand. Back in the days people said lisp in newbies hands will be backfire, but handled by those with abstraction skills it will give you ability to express things you cannot with other systems. Many here agree that technology should not matter, but it does at one point. Some trait of the culture behind and around languages are very very important. Lisp tree recursion, "lexicality" and ad-hoc genericit…

I'm not really a programmer. All my training is in abstract math so whenever I see people arguing over language X and Y it always seems weird to me. I don't write code until I've sketched things out with pencil and paper and by necessity I have to disentagle the syntax of the language from the essence of the problem. Turns out when I do things that way translating the solution back into a language X ends up being the…

This is approach is great for greenfield development, but when it comes to software maintenance I find myself having to think in terms of the target language so that I can formulate the right long-term solution for the codebase in question.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#48

Post by MichaelGG »

i_s wrote: post #15
worldsayshi wrote: post #3

But we need types people! Properly static ones that can be used to encode your intentions and handle inconsistency before even running the program. And yes I know that Clojure has an optional type system. But optional means that you cannot rely on having types in the libraries that you use. So you can't fit your stuff together with their stuff and have reasonable expectations that it will work once the user does that…

Types do have a lot of benefits but they also come with a big cost: some programs are very hard to express in modern type systems. For example, consider a pattern that is becoming more common today in UI programming (even in plain javascript): keeping your UI in one big tree data structure, and then working on arbitrary paths (represented by a sequence of keys) into that data structure. That is not a pattern you can…

So use F#'s dynamic typing parts? Or make everything obj and cast away? Unless most solutions don't work with types then it seems that you're better off having them in the language and using escape hatches as necessary.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#49

Post by cheez »

jtwebman wrote: post #19

He didn't sell me on why Lisp is better than any other language? Why would you pick Lisp or Clojure over say Elixir, Scala, or even F#? JT

It's like Python, but you can transform the structure of your program with the language itself.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#50

Post by sklogic »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

> The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems.

The maximum level of abstraction available for your language is indeed a hard upper limit on how you formulate and solve problems. Solving a complex problem on a high level of abstraction can be trivial, and the same problem may be nearly impossible on lower levels.

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