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The Lisp Curse (2017)

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Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#51

Post by coldtea »

adregan wrote: post #6

OP posted despite the opening paragraph! > Update on October 6, 2017. N.B.: Please stop submitting this to Hacker News! Look at the Hacker News search results for this essay. Check out the note for the first entry: Come on, everyone! Let's beat the dead horse one more time! Past discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Lisp%20Curse&type=story&...

That's a plea from 5 years ago.

People resubmit stories all the time, new and better (or different) discussions form around each resubmission, and new people get to read it.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#52

Post by tharne »

Syzygies wrote: post #43
tharne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it? Same reason most of us use QWERTY keyboards instead of one the many better layouts available. After a long enough time as the dominant tool, things get locked in regardless of whether or not they're the best tool for the job. C-Style languages gained dominance early on and became the defacto standard.

> Same reason most of us use QWERTY keyboards instead of one the many better layouts available. Many people here are coders, not writers, and the layout for generating human language is irrelevant. With QMK firmware tap-hold, and one finger each hand chording, one opens up a quadratic expansion of expressibility, all near home row. Now one can automate all frequent actions (VSCode commands, application launches, wind…

> With QMK firmware tap-hold, and one finger each hand chording, one opens up a quadratic expansion of expressibility, all near home row.

I'm a happy qmk enthusiast. My point was that the overwhelming majority of people will stick with the defaults for most things, which is why usage and adoption rates are not always a good indicator of the quality or utility of a tool.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#53

Post by edgyquant »

badsectoracula wrote: post #33

> Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup. C++ added a ton of additional stuff to C. The original Objective-C is a much simpler approach on adding object orientation to C and at its core it'd all be about finding expressions like [foo bar:baz boo:hoo] and replacing them with something like o…

What’s the point of a constructor that isn’t called immediately? Couldn’t you just use any arbitrary function at that point?

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#55

Post by BeetleB »

nonameiguess wrote: post #32
hajile wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StandardML vs go is a great illustration. StandardML is just as fast, is more simple to learn with more simple syntax and basically zero gotchas, has more powerful syntax, has an actually sound type system (which has better generics than the ones proposed in go), does a better job at defining public functionality (via modules), has a better CST model, and many other great features. The only area where it loses is sta…

SML is great as a language, but has terrible tooling and a balkanized ecosystem of incompatible implementations, many of which only support REPL workflows (and these tend to be the implementations used for teaching). These are a far cry from the typical "point a compiler at a build file and go" that developers are used to. Go may be a strictly worse language as a language but still be better for building and distribu…

Your parent acknowledged everything you said in his comment.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#56

Post by BeetleB »

eimrine wrote: post #44
tharne wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is always that popularity doesn't correlate with merit. Exactly. If we used popularity and usage rates as the measure of merit, we'd have to conclude that the highest quality restaurant in the world is MacDonald's.

> the highest quality restaurant in the world is MacDonald's. Isn't it so? The meal is enough healthy (for hard-workers only, not for calories-gathers), calorage as I have mentioned is excellent, waiting is minimum, non-meal payings (keeping the restaurant attractive) are the lowest possible, the most important thing is that in poor countries (my is in the bottom of bigmac index) the prices are lower than anything el…

I'm one of those who actually likes McDonald's burgers. However, in the last year I decided to stop going there because of multiple experiences with restaurants near me where I ordered to go, and parts of the burger were cold. As in fridge cold.

As for price - not sure what you mean by "poor" countries. In the ones I've traveled to, McDonald's is considered a high end restaurant and is not cheap by the local standards.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#57

Post by lisper »

cogman10 wrote: post #49
badsectoracula wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK it is common to repost a story here if there has been enough time since the last post since there can be new voices, opinions, etc since the last time it was posted. Dang sometimes posts a comment with links to previous discussions too. Perhaps the author is confusing the norms with Reddit where in many subreddits reposts are often frowned upon.

So long as the year is clearly stated, I do think reposts are a bad idea on HN. There have been plenty of old articles that I've seen for the first time in a repost.

Maybe it's time for a permanent "HN Greatest Hits" page.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#58

Post by lisper »

xscott wrote: post #42
badsectoracula wrote: post #33

> Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup. C++ added a ton of additional stuff to C. The original Objective-C is a much simpler approach on adding object orientation to C and at its core it'd all be about finding expressions like [foo bar:baz boo:hoo] and replacing them with something like o…

Yeah, I agree. If you're willing to use a garbage collection library [0], you can even have a pleasant syntax for ObjectiveC style OOP in C: var result = call(foo, "bar: %s boo: %f", baz, hoo); The garbage collector will pick up the stray memory and release other resources (files) as needed, and all the standard compilers will check the varargs format string for you. Dynamic typing, arbitrary messages, and no memory…

Why do you need GC to support this syntax? The syntax has nothing to do with whether or not the semantics of the language permit memory leaks.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#59

Post by bigbillheck »

eadmund wrote: post #19
83457 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Clojure out there now I think the number of products using a Lisp is underestimated.

But Clojure is not a Lisp. It is Lisp-adjacent, a bit, but it is really not the same language.

Perfect example of the Curse, thank you.

Re: The Lisp Curse (2017)

#60

Post by lisper »

klibertp wrote: post #15
Flankk wrote: post #2

> Real Hackers have also known, for a while, that C and C++ are not appropriate for most programs that don't need to do arbitrary bit-fiddling. Strongly disagree with this statement. I've read it so many places now that it has to be a meme. I actually wish I could use C++ on the web instead of this JS nightmare ecosystem. I don't understand where the idea comes from. I'm never "bit-fiddling" in C++ and almost never n…

In my experience the best for "bit-fiddling" is Erlang (and, by extension, Elixir) which offers bit-string literals[1], along with pattern matching on them. It's trivial to implement any binary protocol or parse any binary file format with these. It makes bit-fiddling pleasant and fun, but nobody ever mentions Erlang in these discussions. That's because most programmers are incapable of making any informed decision a…

Common Lisp has bit string literals:

    Welcome to Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.11-r16812M  (DarwinX8664)!
    
    ? #*010010010101001
    #*010010010101001
    ? (type-of *)
    (SIMPLE-BIT-VECTOR 15)
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