even the ai gets lost in the parenthesis
Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#42I have been using AI to write Clojure code this past half year. The frontline LLM has no problem with writing idiomatic Clojure code. Both Codex and Claude Code fix their missing closing parentheses quickly. So I won't say "Writing Lisp is AI resistant". In fact, Clojure is a great fit with AI coding agent: it is token efficient, and the existing Clojure code used for training are mostly high quality code, as Clojure…
Ha, and I’ve been using Datalevin for my vibe-coded apps! Thank you so much for such a wonderful piece of software.
I am glad you enjoyed it. I am happy to report that the next release will have many new features: Raft consensus based high availability (comes with an extensive Jepsen test suite); built-in MCP server; built-in llama.cpp for in DB embedding; JSON API; language bindings for Java, Python and Javascript.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#43> There are reasons other than a lack of training data that makes lisp particularly AI resistant.
It's though to steal what doesn't exist.
> but AI can write hundreds of lines in one go so that it just makes sense for the AI to use a language that doesn't use the REPL. It is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to write in high-internet-volume languages like Go and Python
Python doesn't have a REPL?
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#44> I'd blow $10-$20 in a handful of minutes with not much to show for it but sort of OK lisp code that I ended up rewriting.
That's what you get with every language. So, not much to really be disappointed by in terms of Lisp performance.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#45[flagged]
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes LLMs astonish me with what the code they can write. Other times I have to laugh or cry. As an example, I asked claude 3.5 back when that was the latest to indent all the code in my file by four more spaces. The file was about 700 lines long. I got a busy spinner for two minutes then it said, "OK, first 50 lines done, now I'll do the rest" and got another busy spinner and it said, "this is taking too long. I…
I think LLMs are great at compression and information retrieval, but poor at reasoning. They seem to work well with popular languages like Python because they have been trained with a massive amount of real code. As demonstrated by several publications, on niche languages their performance is quite variable.
I used to find it better to shortcut the AI by asking it to write python to do a task. Claude 4.6 seems to do this without prompting.
Edit: working on a lot of legacy code that needs boring refactoring, which Claude is great at.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right. Try asking GPT-5 this: > Are the parentheses in ((((()))))) balanced? There was a thread about this the other day [1]. It's the same issue as "count the r's in strawberry." Tokenization makes it hard to count characters. If you put that string into OpenAI's tokenizer, [2] this is how they are grouped: Token 1: (((( Token 2: ())) Token 3: ))) Which of course isn't at all how our minds would group…
Don’t ask the LLM to do that directly: ask it to write a program to answer the question, then have it run the program. It works much better that way.
But for lisp, a more complex solution is needed. It's easy for a human lisp programmer to keep track of which closing parentheses corresponds to which opening parentheses because the editor highlights parentheses pairs as they are typed. How can we give an LLM that kind of feedback as it generates code?
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#48Wildly speculating here, but if you buy that human brains have innate / evolved syntactic knowledge, and that this knowledge projects itself as the common syntactic forms across the bulk of human languages, then it’s no surprise that LLMs don’t have particularly deep grooves for s-expressions, regardless of the programming language distribution of the training set.
There is an interesting on-going research https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/sapir-whorf/ that shows LLMs think in a language-agnostic way. (It will probably get posted to HN after it is finished.)
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#49> There are reasons other than a lack of training data that makes lisp particularly AI resistant. It's though to steal what doesn't exist. > but AI can write hundreds of lines in one go so that it just makes sense for the AI to use a language that doesn't use the REPL. It is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to write in high-internet-volume languages like Go and Python Python doesn't have a REPL?
> Python doesn't have a REPL?
Not really in the Lisp sense. If you consider how people typically develop and modify Python code (edit file -> run from beginning -> observe effects -> start over) and how people typically develop Lisp code (rarely do "start over" and "run from beginning" happen) it becomes obvious. Most Python development resembles Go or C++, you just get to skip the explicit "compile" step and go straight to "run". The Python "REPL" is nice for little snippets and little bits of interactive modification but the experience compared to Lisp isn't the same (and I think the experience is actually better/closer to Lisp in Java, with debug mode and JRebel).
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#50Oh. My. God. Will the LISP community ever stop MOANING? It is the consistently most depressing, woe-is-me wailing in the entire IT segment.
You guys are depressing.