The Larch Environment • Hacker News Board

Re: The Larch Environment

#61

Post by sitkack » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #51

lkrubner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The curse of Lisp" is a well known phrase that's been used in hundreds of essays: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curse+of+lisp&oq=the+cur... There has been much debate about why Lisp has not taken over the world of computing. It was invented in 1958, it was taught in all the best schools, yet it has not gained mass traction. Paul Graham has touched on this issue in one of his essays: "So if Lisp makes you a bet…

> "The curse of Lisp" is a well known phrase that's been used in hundreds of essays: If you actually look through the Google results, there are not that many 'essays' about that topic. > There has been much debate about why Lisp has not taken over the world of computing. It was invented in 1958, it was taught in all the best schools, yet it has not gained mass traction. This fate is shared by a lot of things. The who…

You just made some new friends. (seriously, love your attitude (shit, I still sound snide (not being snide, {although parens are making it look that way})))

Re: The Larch Environment

#62

Post by sitkack » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 3:05 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44

lkrubner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The curse of Lisp" is a well known phrase that's been used in hundreds of essays: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curse+of+lisp&oq=the+cur... There has been much debate about why Lisp has not taken over the world of computing. It was invented in 1958, it was taught in all the best schools, yet it has not gained mass traction. Paul Graham has touched on this issue in one of his essays: "So if Lisp makes you a bet…

ESR knows nothing about painters. The painter knows there is never a "best" brush, just different ones. Painters often thrive creatively via constraints, and so the uber brush would actually be unwanted anyways. But I don't see what is relevant here. There are plenty of languages that have received lots of praise but little use. Erm, Haskell anyone? And you really have to clarify what "use" means, because Lisp is def…

When I think of worse is better, I think of Linux, MySQL, Hadoop, PHP and Windows 3.1/95. Even the original Volkswagen is a worse is better car.

Re: The Larch Environment

#63

Post by mkremins » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #59

mkremins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. In programming communities, design is frequently dismissed as an "implementation detail" or part of "making it look good" (i.e. marketing). This is a distinct and recurring cultural blind spot – more conceptually interesting programming tools than I can count have been torpedoed by a lack of attention to visual/UI/UX/HCI design. Design is absolutely critical when it comes to helping people understand…

You do know there is a whole field called programming language design right? Not everyone in the PL field is doing theory or chasing better performance, some of us actually focus on design (and I'm not the only one, and design has been studied and practiced since at least the 70s). Visual design is where we are especially weak, but we have our PX down (like UX, but User becomes Programmer).

Yep, I'm aware. I'm still just a student, but I try to follow PX-related research pretty closely, and I'm actually something of a fan of your work in this space in particular :) I've also got a lot of respect for projects like Elm, where an explicit focus on programming-as-UX has produced a language and development environment that (although incomplete) are collectively more accessible and learnable than many of the existing alternatives.

That said, I'm still of the opinion that programmer culture at large is too quick to disregard design. I'd really like to see more programming tools for general use developed with an eye to design, and for more industry and hobbyist programmers to realize that the current baseline state of existence is not an absolute maximum but a local one. We've pushed plain text pretty far, but it seems obvious to me that there's much bigger wins to be had if we throw out some of the assumptions our culture tends to make.

Re: The Larch Environment

#64

Post by captainmuon » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #33

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #3

This is the 3rd or 4th time I've seen a proposal for visual programming environments (e.g. see http://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/* , LightTable, this one, probably others) and I'm not sure why they don't take off. On the one hand, they seem incredibly useful and I really like Code Bubbles' approach to automatically pulling in relevant code ( http://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/bubbles01.gif ). On the other hand,…

The one that really worked was HyperCard. Though it is now forgotten, it had a large following back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was also used to teach programming to children in some elite private schools (maybe it also made it into the public schools?). Danny Goodman wrote a book about it that some of us remember fondly; it was as good an introduction to basic programming as anything ever written. HyperCar…

> The Internet will need a new protocol for apps, rather than documents.

A bit off-topic (sorry), but that's a good point. I believe it would be great for a future version of HTML to have two 'profiles', one for documents and one for apps. The document metaphor is great for, well, plain documents, but it is problematic for apps, like Gmail. For example it can be annoying if you have JS-heavy sites which break document-related features (navigation, resizing, printing, copying).

Have a document profile where you have all the markup features, but the javascript features are possibly restricted. This corresponds to a lean version of HTML5. You know HTML6-doc pages will look reasonable and load quickly on all devices, including on ebooks and printed out.

Then have a app profile where you don't even need a document - you can just draw on canvasses if you want, but you can also create HTML elements. I imagine that people write GUI libraries for it. You have access to all fancy modern JS features, like sockets, webcam, etc.. This would be the time to change the wierd security model of HTML - a page with the DOCTYPE HTML6-app would opt into a new model, where pages don't have access to all credentials and cookies by default, so it is reasonably safe to give them net access (they can't buy stuff if you are logged into amazon in another tab, for example).

The best thing is, we can start using these new paradigms today - and maybe have nice little badges to show we are following the new "best practice" :-). Restict yourself to minimal, presentational, progressive-enhancement JS for documents, use semantic markup, check that it looks good on all devices etc.. And when you are doing a (single-page) app, it doesn't have to look like a document, but heed all the advice for non-web desktop or mobile apps - and make sure your app doesn't break navigation.

Re: The Larch Environment

#65

Post by noblethrasher » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 7:12 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44

lkrubner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The curse of Lisp" is a well known phrase that's been used in hundreds of essays: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curse+of+lisp&oq=the+cur... There has been much debate about why Lisp has not taken over the world of computing. It was invented in 1958, it was taught in all the best schools, yet it has not gained mass traction. Paul Graham has touched on this issue in one of his essays: "So if Lisp makes you a bet…

ESR knows nothing about painters. The painter knows there is never a "best" brush, just different ones. Painters often thrive creatively via constraints, and so the uber brush would actually be unwanted anyways. But I don't see what is relevant here. There are plenty of languages that have received lots of praise but little use. Erm, Haskell anyone? And you really have to clarify what "use" means, because Lisp is def…

Actually, the quote is from Paul Graham, who does happen to know a little about painters, being one himself. Also, he wasn't claiming that Lisp is the "best" brush, only that it is analogous to a brush that will make you a better painter… somehow.

Interestingly, the "other big Lisp advocate" just happens to also advance the idea that programming against constraints is good for the same reason you mention, except that he used examples of famous composers rather than painters since he's a musician himself[1].

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...