Virding's YouTube presentation at a Clojure conference about this new lisp says this in the caption: >LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) has been designed to run efficiently on the Erlang VM and at the same time be a "real lisp" providing Lisp's good bits. It also knocks Clojure a bit. What do you all think are the "good bits" of lisp that Clojure lacks?
FWIW, reading this sentence w/o any extra context, it doesn't seem to imply anything bad about clojure.
Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#42Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he…
Elixir is really not similar to Ruby and the comparison wears thin. This is my opinion after having used Elixir daily for the last 1.5 years and Ruby for 10 years before that. Elixir really is a brilliant language and José et al have made the developer experience second to none with hex, mix, the language guide and docs. Compare how you bring up a repl: Elixir, type iex; LFE, cd into LFE dir, type ./bin/lfe. (EDIT: t…
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It started in 2007 with the release of Clojure and there are still plenty of paren keys around.
The Lisp renaissance started in December 1999 with SBCL being forked from CMUCL.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#44Virding's YouTube presentation at a Clojure conference about this new lisp says this in the caption: >LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) has been designed to run efficiently on the Erlang VM and at the same time be a "real lisp" providing Lisp's good bits. It also knocks Clojure a bit. What do you all think are the "good bits" of lisp that Clojure lacks?
[1] http://shenlanguage.org/Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
One obvious example is that AFAIK the VM doesn't support functions with a variable number of arguments (foo/1 and foo/2 are two separate functions). This means that you can't have CL-style &rest or &key arguments.
This is a feature to me more like a limitation. I do not like optional arguments &rest style. In Erlang you need to have explicit number of arguments and need to explicitly implement them. I really like that. Keep in mind that default values are trivial to implement when the smaller arity function calls the higher arity one with added values. Or you can call in yourself to the higher arity function and specify the pa…
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a feature to me more like a limitation. I do not like optional arguments &rest style. In Erlang you need to have explicit number of arguments and need to explicitly implement them. I really like that. Keep in mind that default values are trivial to implement when the smaller arity function calls the higher arity one with added values. Or you can call in yourself to the higher arity function and specify the pa…
I feel like it's OK not having rest args if you leave them out in order to support currying, but leaving both out seems really weird for a language that's trying to be functional.
Even syntaxes which have OAIPA can (and do) still have optional parentheses to exactly delimit the arguments of a call, and that notation can clearly support variadic args.
Outside of explicit delimiting with parens, OAIPA can work on a variadic function up to its required arguments by considering it to be a function of exactly that number of arguments, and no more.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#47Virding's YouTube presentation at a Clojure conference about this new lisp says this in the caption: >LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) has been designed to run efficiently on the Erlang VM and at the same time be a "real lisp" providing Lisp's good bits. It also knocks Clojure a bit. What do you all think are the "good bits" of lisp that Clojure lacks?
Readable stack traces. Unfortunately, the JVM is the culprit here. I like Clojure's syntax, and some other bits, but if I were to chose a Lisp that runs under another system like Clojure, I'd choose Shen [1]. [1] http://shenlanguage.org/
Hm, I guess I can't imagine how that would work, one language running under all those environments?
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a feature to me more like a limitation. I do not like optional arguments &rest style. In Erlang you need to have explicit number of arguments and need to explicitly implement them. I really like that. Keep in mind that default values are trivial to implement when the smaller arity function calls the higher arity one with added values. Or you can call in yourself to the higher arity function and specify the pa…
In Erlang you need to have explicit number of arguments and need to explicitly implement them. Or, you know, just use lists as parameters. That's the standard Erlang pattern for unknown parameters lengths (e.g. io:format("debug ~s because ~p~n", [SomeString, SomeType]))
In Lisp dialects, that is done by a variadic function:
(list 1 2 3 4 ...)
Of course, if we don't need to indirect on this function, we could implement it as a macro (supposing further that we have variadic macros for compile time, but not variadic functions for run time).The macro would turn (list 1 2 3) into the non-variadic calls (cons 1 (cons 2 (cons 3 nil))).
I imagine that's a conceptual facsimile of what Erlang's list constructor notation is doing.
Erlang has variadic features in its read syntax; without a doubt its BNF is chock full of "zero or more of ..." grammar productions. The function defining mechanism lets you define a function which has any number of arguments; just that number has to be fixed for that function. So the mechanism itself enjoys variadic application. Here it is asked to define a three-arg function, here a ten-arg, ...
We can simulate some aspects of variadic application with syntactic sugar, but not all. A Lisp function call which specifies five arguments can call a function which requires exactly five arguments, or a function which requires three arguments, followed by variadic ones.
For instance, if we have a callback registration interface that passes five arguments, the client can supply a fixed arity function, or a variadic one.
I suppose that if everything is static, that can still be worked out. The compiler sees that a variadic function with only two required args is passed as a callback that must be 5-ary, so it inserts a conversion shim: an anonymous function which takes exactly 5 parameters and applies them to the 3+rest function.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#49Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he…
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development
#50Elixir is really not similar to Ruby and the comparison wears thin. Wasn't Elixir just created because 100%-Ruby-til-Death programmers refuse to learn any other non-ruby-like syntax? It's like their brains would shatter into a brillion pieces if they ever had to think about tail recursion. have made the developer experience second to none Except, LFE isn't a giant community and companies and organizations and confere…
The fact that it looks Rubyish at times is just the creator's aesthetic preference, but it wasn't the motivator.
[0] http://www.sitepoint.com/an-interview-with-elixir-creator-jo...