Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development • Hacker News Board

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#61

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #4

Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he…

I think the JVM can use some good competition and BEAM is ideally geared towards the next generation of immutable/functional/concurrent languages

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#62

Post by oubiwann » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:06 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #43

lispm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lisp renaissance started in December 1999 with SBCL being forked from CMUCL.

On the other hand, 1999 was the downfall of LISP in the statistical community because that's when Luke Tierney decided to stop working on LISP-STAT, a LISP dialect with extensions for statistics that was semi-popular before the advent of R. While there have been statistical systems based on LISP since (such as Incanter for Clojure and a port of many of the extensions of LISP-STAT to Common Lisp) none have managed to…

I have the LISP-STAT book by Luke Tierney on my desk right now. Love it :-)

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#63

Post by cronjobber » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #8

jsnell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One obvious example is that AFAIK the VM doesn't support functions with a variable number of arguments (foo/1 and foo/2 are two separate functions). This means that you can't have CL-style &rest or &key arguments.

While &key is CL-specific (and if you don't have it, you can ad-hoc it if you have variable arguments) variadic functions are pretty important, and found broadly in Lisp dialects. If you're on a VM or other target that doesn't do them natively, it's worth fighting tooth and nail to somehow get the functionality. E.g. make an inefficient variadic type that at the VM level takes a single argument---a list or vector of…

> variadic functions are pretty important

As you already wrote in another comment, most practical uses of variadic functions can be replaced by macros.

What remains that is worth fighting the platform for?

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#64

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

The users manual has a stub section for macros; does anybody know how LFE macros work? It says "lisp style" but that allows at least 4 options (syntax pattern-matching versus classic defmacro, and capturing versus non-capturing).

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#65

Post by philjackson » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

oubiwann wrote: post #57

philjackson wrote: post #32

I'd love to see a comparison with Clojure, anyone know of such a thing yet?

It's a work in progress, but this might be useful: * http://lfex.github.io/hyperpolyglot/

Great - thanks.

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#66

Post by rvirding » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #54

akavel wrote: post #17

I've stumbled into an interesting related comment on twitter, didn't know: "#Erlang based language ecosystem is more diverse than many know: #efene #reia #lfe #luaerl #erlog #elixir #mercury" https://twitter.com/BillBarnhill/status/670601359016771584 edit: Wow, and many of them seem to actually be by the same rvirding who authored lfe: https://github.com/rvirding/luerl https://github.com/rvirding/erlog

Shame about luerl not supporting __metatable properly. That's half of why Lua is awesome. Still a massive achievement, awesome stuff.

Main issue is that luerl does support metatables. That caveat was written ago and I can't remember what it was I didn't support then. But as I said now it works.

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#67

Post by rvirding » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 5:07 PM UTC

andrewvijay wrote: post #7

Just waiting for the day when someone launches a js version then the whole world is gonna be coding on erlang vm I think.

There have been "hints" that why don't I implement JS on top of erlang as well. Would love to try, and some of the problems have been solved in my luerl implementation, but the main problem is time, the lack of it.

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#68

Post by lispm » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #43

lispm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lisp renaissance started in December 1999 with SBCL being forked from CMUCL.

On the other hand, 1999 was the downfall of LISP in the statistical community because that's when Luke Tierney decided to stop working on LISP-STAT, a LISP dialect with extensions for statistics that was semi-popular before the advent of R. While there have been statistical systems based on LISP since (such as Incanter for Clojure and a port of many of the extensions of LISP-STAT to Common Lisp) none have managed to…

That was the consequence of users switching to S/R years before.

https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v013i07/v13i07.pdf

Users of maths software usually don't want to use Lisp syntax and are not ready to work in Lisp.

XLisp-Stat had also the problem that it used its own Lisp implementation, based on XLisp (upto Xlisp 2), which itself wasn't going anywhere. David Betz, the original author of Xlisp, rewrote Xlisp as a form of Scheme (Xlisp 3.0) and it died eventually. Xlisp-Plus, another Xlisp version, was mostly abandoned also in that timeframe - though there are updated versions available now.

Other math software, which had been ported to Common Lisp, is still maintained - like Maxima. The maintainers can concentrate on the application and the code is much easier portable to new systems because of a choice of implementations.

Had XLisp-Stat been fully ported to Common Lisp (actually a rough port of the Xlisp-Stat core to Common Lisp was done many years ago) and maintained there - at least the code would still be easier usable.

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#69

Post by rvirding » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

strmpnk wrote: post #53

jarpineh wrote: post #52

This looks really interesting. I installed it easily through Brew. REPL seems to work fast. Now if my Clojure flawored Lisp starter level knowledge could be somehow transformed into Erlang flawor... I wrote this: > (map (lists:seq 1 10) (lambda (a) (io:format a))) and this happened: #M((1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) #Fun ) So, I'm not quite there yet. Hopefully somebody can make a Clojure to LFE comparison. And using Elixir…

Map is a constructor in this case. You'll want lists:map/2 (fn comes first). I don't know LFE much so there may be sugar of sorts for this, perhaps a comprehension syntax.

Yes, there are list comprehensions but they return the list of values:

(lc ((<- x (lists:seq 1 10))) (lfe_io:format "~p" x))

Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

#70

Post by lispm » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

oubiwann wrote: post #62

jhbadger wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, 1999 was the downfall of LISP in the statistical community because that's when Luke Tierney decided to stop working on LISP-STAT, a LISP dialect with extensions for statistics that was semi-popular before the advent of R. While there have been statistical systems based on LISP since (such as Incanter for Clojure and a port of many of the extensions of LISP-STAT to Common Lisp) none have managed to…

I have the LISP-STAT book by Luke Tierney on my desk right now. Love it :-)

That's actually a very nice book.