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How Lisp is Going to Save the World

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Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#51

Post by dons »

gnosis wrote: post #19
david927 wrote: post #16

With the deepest reverence to John McCarthy, I regret to say that Lisp is our cosmological constant. It creates a static universe that is otherwise expanding; it reduces the problem to a solvable one and then declares victory. The truth is, it's all state. All of it. Remember that movie "Boy in the Plastic Bubble," about a boy with an immune system deficiency who lives instead a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble? T…

Lisp is a multi-paradigm language that's perfectly capable of representing state. Perhaps you're confusing it with some purely functional language like Haskell.

... of course Haskell is perfectly capable of representing state too ...

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#52

Post by lispm »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #48
lispm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No free implementations existed during a key period BS. CMUCL. AKCL. CLISP.

OK, let me correct myself: No competitive free implementation existed able to take a leading position and bootstrap the ecosystem, like gcc, cpython, perl and javac did for their respective language ecosystems. I did not intend to imply that nothing. existed. whatsoever. cmucl, gcl (akcl) and clisp even today are insignificant also-rans and basically unmaintained abandonware.

> No competitive free implementation existed able to take a leading position and bootstrap the ecosystem, like gcc, cpython, perl and javac did for their respective language ecosystems.

it was never a goal in the Lisp community to develop a single unified or leading implementation. This has nothing to do with 'free software' or not.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#53

Post by JeanPierre »

santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

    If it is so good why ain't it is used more?
pg has written about this [1], and the main reason he found was that popularity is always self-perpetuating. If one of the languages get a head start with libraries, it's usually easier to develop programs and libraries within this language than other languages. If you know a popular language, you're more likely to have more job opportunities. If you're a manager, you would prefer to be able to replace programmers easily.

That's one of the reasons why Clojure started off on the JVM in the first place: It has libraries and an already thriving ecosystem. In addition, it's a nice bonus for language developers to not have to worry about performance related to GCing, threading, OS-specific differences etc, which the JVM abstracts away.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#54

Post by dsafhkjsdh »

who write this crap? i wrote in lisp (scheme), this is the most bugged language i ever used. and i used more then 5.

this is non debugable language, it it makes it bug full. you have to follow complex ideas, and keep scores of ideas, this is not for normal humans.

when you pass the wrong type and not support it, it goes to hell, and as a programmer you start to flame.

list, is a piece of shit for the masses, its useful for handful, who didn't distribute the ideas well, and people when to the place where it was easier to write code, and less is needed for getting your path going.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#55

Post by lispm »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #11
santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more? * Weird syntax (for most people). * No free implementations existed during a key period (80s, 90s) so no initial traction, no useful libraries and killer apps which would pull the whole ecosystem. Implementations didnt even exist for commodity hardware. * The commercial implementations cost too much, so they suffocated the ecosystem. People preferred coding for free in C…

> IDE with Emacs-based SLIME

That's also not new. Common Lisp has an Emacs IDE since before the dark ages. It was called ILISP. Every Lisp + Emacs user was using it. Well, Franz had/has their own Emacs interface called ELI.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#56

Post by dasil003 »

david927 wrote: post #16

With the deepest reverence to John McCarthy, I regret to say that Lisp is our cosmological constant. It creates a static universe that is otherwise expanding; it reduces the problem to a solvable one and then declares victory. The truth is, it's all state. All of it. Remember that movie "Boy in the Plastic Bubble," about a boy with an immune system deficiency who lives instead a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble? T…

I'm sorry but what you're saying is immediately obvious. No one in the functional programming world is laboring under the impression that state doesn't exist.

The real issue is whether you think it's worth separating out code that can be reasoned about in a mathematical fashion from stateful code that has to deal with mutating concerns. Functional programming is where research on improving abstractions to better allow this separation of concerns, which is pretty much the opposite of a clumsy hermetically-sealed bubble rolling around and knocking lamps over, etc.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#57

Post by jerf »

larholm wrote: post #28
gnosis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons avoiding state is promoted is to make it easier to write robust software. State is too often the enemy of robustness.

And robustness is often the static plastic bubble that hides in itself, never accomplishing much in the real world. State is too often the real world. Mind you, I like robustness. It's like the cinder blocks I use to build my house, each robust and contained in itself. I just can't disregard state when stacking my cinder blocks on top of each other; the flexing and distribution of load is an emergent state that I hav…

I translate your first paragraph to "I have never used Haskell" in my head.

The idea that Haskell is somehow about not doing anything because it can't do state is just silly. It doesn't pass the smell test. People do not write web frameworks or compilers or anything in a language that "can't do anything" because it can't do state.

Haskell is not about "not touching state". That's just objectively wrong. It may not work exactly like you are used to, you may not like the tradeoffs, but Haskell can do things. I know, because I can make it do things.

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#58

Post by xradionut »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #11
santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more? * Weird syntax (for most people). * No free implementations existed during a key period (80s, 90s) so no initial traction, no useful libraries and killer apps which would pull the whole ecosystem. Implementations didnt even exist for commodity hardware. * The commercial implementations cost too much, so they suffocated the ecosystem. People preferred coding for free in C…

Add in the flame wars and jerks on Usenet that crapped on many folks that were interested. People went off in search of friendly enivironments and ended up in C, Perl and Python...

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#59

Post by firepoet »

gnosis wrote: post #31
bitdiddle wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is. I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds

When I first learned Lisp, I quickly got to the point where I "don't even see the parenthesis". Shortly after that I learned to love them, and see them (and Lisp's simple syntax as a great strength). Now extraneous syntax, even in a half-Lisp like Clojure, seems ugly to me. It's a real pity more people don't appreciate the elegant simplicity of Lisp (and especially Scheme).

Just a curiosity -- why do you call Clojure a "half-Lisp?"

Re: How Lisp is Going to Save the World

#60

Post by cgag »

santu11 wrote: post #5

I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?

Clojure is very capable for web development, but getting started is not as clear cut as it is with something like Rails or Django. This is because the Clojure community tends to eschew large frameworks, and instead prefers using smaller, more focused libraries. This provides a lot of flexibility, but is intimidating at first because it requires you to choose your own libraries for routing, db interaction, templating, etc.

Everything is to be built on top of Ring, which is the Clojure equivalent of Rack or WSGI. Compojure is pretty much the standard for routing at the moment. Korma is a very popular DSL for writing SQL. For templating, Hiccup and Enlive are popular, but there are other options as well.

I would start off by getting a decent understanding of Ring and Compojure and building from there.

--

https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring

https://github.com/weavejester/compojure

https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup

https://github.com/cgrand/enlive

http://sqlkorma.com/

http://www.clojure-toolbox.com/ is really helpful for finding appropriate libraries.

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