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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)

#51

Post by johan_larson »

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.

Oops. My bad. Sorry.

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

#52

Post by lizmat »

sshine wrote: post #41
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.

FWIW, in Perl 6, keys to so-called "object hashes" can be objects without them being stringified. See https://docs.perl6.org/language/hashmap#index-entry-object_h...

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

#53

Post by drmeister »

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…

You have four different choices for hash-tables. You choose how the key hashing should work with four levels - pointer hashing (which is very fast) to hashing the contents of arrays and list keys (which is slow). If you only get one choice then hash-tables wouldn't be as powerful.

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

#54

Post by PopsiclePete »

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…

One thing I struggle to understand is how common lisp deals with the "modern" multi-core world. Not just "async i/o" - that's just the tip of the iceberg - but concurrency in general.

I know that common lisp (the spec) explicitly doesn't mention any of this - it was the early 90's so who cared anyway - but how would you fit common lisp into a modern server-side app that has to process many things at once? Or is that just not an area that it's concerned with?

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

#55

Post by drmeister »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #54
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…

One thing I struggle to understand is how common lisp deals with the "modern" multi-core world. Not just "async i/o" - that's just the tip of the iceberg - but concurrency in general. I know that common lisp (the spec) explicitly doesn't mention any of this - it was the early 90's so who cared anyway - but how would you fit common lisp into a modern server-side app that has to process many things at once? Or is that…

I implemented multithreading in Clasp using pthreads and added support for the 'bordeaux-threads' library (https://github.com/sionescu/bordeaux-threads). Now any program that does multi-threading using the bordeaux-threads library works in Clasp. This is how Common Lisp adds support for new capabilities.

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

#56

Post by dreamcompiler »

drmeister wrote: post #53
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…

You have four different choices for hash-tables. You choose how the key hashing should work with four levels - pointer hashing (which is very fast) to hashing the contents of arrays and list keys (which is slow). If you only get one choice then hash-tables wouldn't be as powerful.

And in many implementations you have several options for weakness on hash tables. While not required by the standard, weakness is a very powerful enhancement to hash tables. (Weakness is the kind of thing programmers could add themselves if CL had a MOP for the garbage collector.)

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

#57

Post by dreamcompiler »

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 rather hostile online, but his technical abilities were quite high and his opinions well-researched. I met him once IRL (as did many Lispers when Franz paid his way to the Lisp conference in Berkeley in (can't remember which year. PG was a keynote speaker and McCarthy was holding court in the hallway.) Erik seemed perfectly polite in person. To me anyway.

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

#58

Post by gowld »

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…

Did Google have a lot of Python in the early 2000s?

In 2002, C++ had a plethora of non-standard hash-tables: http://www.drdobbs.com/the-standard-librarianhash-tables-for... Today there are a plethora of standard hash tables.

Yet C++ isn't dying like Lisp.

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

#59

Post by avmich »

> What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found myself suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python.

Wonder what critical features of Python are particularly hard to replace with Lisp extensions. Interface with other runtime environments?..

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

#60

Post by rurban »

Clarification: He only lost his faith into Enterprise Common Lisp. He didn't make his Lisp into Space (the Mars Rover), only as simulator, and then he had to write the Google Adwords program in Java.

There are still plenty of successful but very small Enterprise Common Lisp companies, many of them being bought later and converted into something worse: Viaweb, Ithaka, Nintendo, NaughtyDog, ... KTI, Bentley or Grammarly still doing strong.

https://lisp-lang.org/success/

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