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How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

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Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#41

Post by sshine »

chubot wrote: post #31

My summary: he worked at Google in the early 2000's (when there were indeed many astonishingly productive progammers), and he saw them being super productive in languages like Python. And he himself became productive in such non-Lisp languages. He uses the hash table as an example, and I think it's apt. Lisp does feel "old" to me with respect to having 10 different choices for hash tables in 10 different dialects. (I…

Also, standard libraries that make good choices have won.

These are some of the most annoying part of any language: In Perl the key of a hash must be a string, in Haskell, String is a linked list. And so on.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

jcelerier wrote: post #7
sctb wrote: post #4

Previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. " well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan... There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year fro…

[deleted]

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#43

Post by hyperman1 »

jcelerier wrote: post #7
sctb wrote: post #4

Previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. " well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan... There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year fro…

Dutch and German are classified differently (cat 1 vs 2). But it is a well-known language gimmick of these 2 specific languages that when a native speaker of one of these languages speaks slow enough, a native speaker of the other one can understand him reasonably well. So where do these 6 weeks of extra work come from?

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#44

Post by wedesoft »

drmeister wrote: post #39

After 35 years of programming, I discovered Common Lisp and programming is enjoyable again. I wish I'd discovered it earlier. With what I've learned in the last five years I've (1) written a Common Lisp compiler that interoperates with C++ and uses LLVM as the backend (github.com/cando-developers/clasp); (2) I've used it as the basis of a programming environment for designing new molecules and materials; (3) we've de…

Thanks. I really enjoyed your Google Techtalk about CLASP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#45

Post by aidenn0 »

wpietri wrote: post #33

A few questions for the Lisp fans out there: 1. The summary here seems to be "modern high-level languages, used, well, are just as productive as Lisp." Does that seem right? 2. One of the tensions for me in technology is between love of simplicity and love of complexity. An example of the latter is Enterprise Java, where the tendency toward a FactoryProxyBeanMutatorFactoryInterfaceImplementation is well known. Is the…

1. The gap is smaller, and shrinking every year but still exists, and it's not just macros; the condition system and the tooling is way better.

The tooling alone is sufficient reason for me to use lisp. Even commercial IDEs for python (e.g. pycharms) are nowhere near as good as slime, plus sbcl is a compiled language. I can change a function, run a test and get instruction level profiling information. Pretty much no modern dynamic language lets you do that, and the non-modern static languages (e.g. C++) take longer to link (much less compile) then it takes me to do all of those steps for incremental changes in lisp code.

2. I have a strong simplicity bias, so I can't argue there. I will say that lisp is good at "getting out of your way" which helps remove a lot of accidental complexity. Java (particularly the Java from 15 years ago), is notoriously bad at "getting out of your way" so they are near opposite ends of the spectrum there.

3. Lisp works fine in teams; most languages with small communities have fewer team projects just because the set of possible teams grows quadratically with the size of the community. This is exacerbated in the lisp community which historically has several silos. For open source projects, SBCL (which is written in lisp) is the first team project that comes to mind.

For commercial software, QPX comes to mind; ITA was listed as having 400ish employees, I'm not sure how many were working on lisp code though.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#46

Post by forinti »

I had tons of fun with Lisp in college and have wanted to use it various times in my career but never had any success convincing my colleagues.

I am also very fond of Perl and I've been able to use it many times because it was already there (I didn't need to install anything) and I could find excellent modules on CPAN.

I bet Lisp would be way more popular if every Linux installation came fitted with it.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#47

Post by Fellshard »

skh wrote: post #36
johan_larson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll bite. Do you live or work in an environment where you could call someone ignorant and be understood to mean only that there is some specific bit of knowledge they don't posses, without making a larger accusation of intellectual incompetence? Where? I try to be sensitive to issues of usage like this because civility does not come easily to me, and I have to be careful of what I say lest I inadvertently offend…

I think you misunderstand my post. The person who was quoted as saying that “ignorant” isn’t pejorative since the dictionary definition of the word isn’t pejorative is being an ass. Colloquial usage trumps dictionary definitions when it comes to interpreting speech.

Depends on the context, too. Especially in non-casual contexts, where more rigor is expected, you take greater care to use and define terms more consistently in order to make communication more accurate and effective.

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#48

Post by aidenn0 »

dlivingston wrote: post #40
mcguire wrote: post #35

" At this point I was seriously considering the possibility that there really was a thriving Lisp economy out there somewhere, and that I was being excluded from it for some reason, like maybe my reputation for being obnoxious. (But even that theory came unraveled when you showed up, Erik.) " Ouch. And in further posts, Erik responds, " Sigh. Will you _ever_ get a clue? (For full credit, your answer must be 2000 word…

I saw that too...ouch. What's the beef about here?

Erik was (he has passed away) fairly obnoxious. Like makes Linux Torvalds look like a diplomat obnoxious.

e.g. Naggum on XML: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML

Re: How I lost my faith in Lisp (2002)

#50

Post by zackmorris »

wpietri wrote: post #33

A few questions for the Lisp fans out there: 1. The summary here seems to be "modern high-level languages, used, well, are just as productive as Lisp." Does that seem right? 2. One of the tensions for me in technology is between love of simplicity and love of complexity. An example of the latter is Enterprise Java, where the tendency toward a FactoryProxyBeanMutatorFactoryInterfaceImplementation is well known. Is the…

I feel like Lisp didn't win out for the same reason that HP calculators never won out: people don't like the mental burden of flipping their calculations around by hand. Which is another way of saying that functional programming (FP) doesn't follow any of the imperative programming (IP) conventions they're used to (by design, generally).

Everything about FP is conceptually good except for the human element. I find other people's FP examples to be exceptionally hard to read. But in fairness not as hard as object-oriented programming (OOP) IP languages like Ruby or Angular. I picture them as two extremes: abstract formalism with FP on the one hand and syntactic sugar/convention/patterns with IP/OOP on the other. I'm classically trained so to speak, so I can make the mental leap to FP when I need to. But I continuously have trouble with IP languages because for the most part I don't understand what problem they're trying to solve.

I think Elixir, Clojure and F# are making inroads on the FPIP/OOP front but they still aren't easy enough for mainstream adoption IMHO. Haskell, Scala etc are too fringe and have probably already reached saturation.

Also I do agree about the ignorance aspect. Most programmers I've met don't understand the difference between simple and easy, as examined in depth by Rich Hickey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34_L7t7fD_U

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