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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#61

Post by andersmurphy »

johnfn wrote: post #13

> Many point to “ecosystems” as the barrier, an argument that’s valid for Common Lisp but not for Clojure, which interops easily with one of the largest ecosystems in existence. So many misperceptions dominate, especially the reflexive reaction that the parentheses are “weird”. Most importantly, you almost never see these perceived costs weighed against Clojure’s huge benefits. Macros are the focus of this post, but…

>Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems.

The irony is Clojure(script) has all those things. By virtue of being hosted on the JVM and Javacript and having first class interop with both. ClojureCLR even gives you access to all of C# etc.

Being hosted was a great play in terms of ecosystem.

What it doesn't have is ALGOL style syntax.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#62

Post by libraryofbabel »

xigoi wrote: post #32
libraryofbabel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

> What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust? If you only think about programming languages as a way to make money, the analogy of being stuck in Flatland is perfect.

That's a bit of an ad feminam attack, isn't it? Just because I used the phrase "business concepts", somehow money is the only thing I care about when it comes to language choice? And yet, in my top-level post I said I went and learned lisp and clojure and read SCIP, and I will add that I did both of those things for fun. So no, I don't only think of programming languages as a way to make money. Elegance and expressiveness are interesting for their own sake. I trained as a mathematician; of course I think that.

But TFA was riffing on Paul Graham's old essay Beating the Averages, which argued precisely that the expressiveness of Lisp gave his startup a business edge. That was the context of my comment. I'd add that most of what most of us do in our day jobs is to use programming languages to make money, and there's no shame in that at all. And if you want to talk about why certain languages get widespread adoption and others not, you have to talk about the corporate context: there is no way around it.

But I'll rephrase my question, just for you: "what abstract problems can you solve or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust?"

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#63

Post by logicprog »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

"It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world."

This is me to a T — even when I'm building hobby projects. The point of writing any code, for me, is most of all to see a certain idea to fruition, so I choose what will make me most productive getting where I want to go. And while I still worship at the altar of Common Lisp as an incredibly good language, the language matters much less than the libraries, ecosystem, and documentation for productivity (or even effective DSL style abstraction level!), so eventually I have had to make my peace with Python, TypeScript, and Rust.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#64

Post by andersmurphy »

nine_k wrote: post #59
wrs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that you could implement type checking with macros, not that you could type check macros. (Though that would be cool!) As opposed to having to change the language definition first (Python) or implement an entirely new compiler (TypeScript).

Certainly you can implement the typechecker with macros, but it should also work on macros, before expansion. That is, you likely want (-> ...) typechecked as written, not (only) as expanded, and typing errors reported on the non-expanded form.

Right the same way the type checker should check the type checker.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#65

Post by didibus »

chromaton wrote: post #15

Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.

I take Lisp more like artisanal work. It actually requires more skill and attention to use, but in good hands it can let someone really deliver a lot quickly.

That said, like in anything else, this kind of craftsmanship doesn't translate to monetization and scale the markets demands. What markets want is to lower barrier for entry, templatize, cheapen things, and so on.

It's normal then that languages optimized for the lowest common denominator, with less expressive power and more hand holding have won in popularity in enterprise and such, where making money is the goal, but that Lisp remains a strong and popular language for the enthousiasts looking to level up their craft or just geek out.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#66

Post by didibus »

tra3 wrote: post #28

I've been using emacs and have written a a few thousand lines of elisp. I like elisp. I generally like any language that I become proficient in. But lisp isn't some sort of magical hammer that turns everyone into 10x programmers. Maybe I still haven't had my epiphany, but I'm not a huge fan of macros in lisps and DSLs (like what ruby is known for). It makes code harder to understand. > Everyone knows that debugging i…

I don't think you should use eLisp as your point of reference. It's the worst Lisp by far.

Lisps are a continuum, and I still think there's room for new ones that are even better.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#67

Post by Terr_ »

logicprog wrote: post #63
libraryofbabel wrote: post #5

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap. It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through…

"It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises 4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world." This is me to a T — even when I'…

Tacking on, part of seeing it to fruition, and continued lifetime, is to ensure you can communicate the intent and operation to a large group of potential successors and co-workers.

An incredible epiphany that you can't transmit may not be as useful as a a moderately clever idea you can.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#68

Post by dap »

xigoi wrote: post #32
libraryofbabel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can yo…

> What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust? If you only think about programming languages as a way to make money, the analogy of being stuck in Flatland is perfect.

I’m sympathetic to looking down on the obsession with money. But there’s something deep and important about the monetary element. Engineering is about solving real-world, practical problems. The cost is a real factor in whether a potential solution is a useful one.

I think the money question is a red herring here. I’d phrase it more like: what problem in a user’s problem space is expressible only like this? And if the only user is the programmer, that’s alright, but feels more aligned with pure academia. That’s important, too! But has a much smaller audience than engineering at large.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#69

Post by logicprog »

Terr_ wrote: post #67
logicprog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who: 1) Have tried lisp and clojure 2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness 3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises 4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world." This is me to a T — even when I'…

Tacking on, part of seeing it to fruition, and continued lifetime, is to ensure you can communicate the intent and operation to a large group of potential successors and co-workers. An incredible epiphany that you can't transmit may not be as useful as a a moderately clever idea you can.

Yeah that's another good point. I always hope anything I make can be improved or understood by others. Now, does that happen? No. But it'd be nice

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#70

Post by bccdee »

hashmap wrote: post #11

> The ability to manipulate compile-time so effortlessly is a new dimension of programming. This new dimension enables you to write fundamentally better code that you’ll never be able to achieve in a lower dimension. Show me. Specifically, material outcomes that I will care about.

Serialization & deserialization, for instance. Macros are great for generating ser/de hooks automatically.

Thing is, other languages do this with metaprogramming or explicit codegen. Everyone needs metaprogramming sometimes—that's why everything supports it, actually.

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