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The programmers who live in Flatland

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#71

Post by bccdee »

evdubs wrote: post #58
chihuahua wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions. Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp. Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the s…

> Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python. Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions…

That's a bad thing, though. You should not be `eval`-ing your config file, much less untrusted messages.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#72

Post by somethingsome »

parpfish wrote: post #2

it'd be nice if there was an attempt to give an example of what kind of powers moving into 3d-lispland allows instead of just saying that it's beyond the comprehension of the 2d-planar programmers. because, i guarantee that it's not beyond our comprehension. at some point the author was a 2d-er that read/did something and had their understanding expanded. so... do that for us

Let say.. I remember quite well when I learned Lisp, and differently to any other language I learned, it gave me profound insights and even more profound frustration trying to understand some concepts.

I remember playing with call with cc, or creating a flow programming language, thinking in higher order, etc..

I clearly do not want to work with lisp, and many of those concepts can be used in other languages without too much effort now (lambdas, map, filter, reduce,... Among the most common and useful).

I think learning lisp is nice as it helps explore interesting areas of programming on a mental level. I can't stress enough how it can wrap your mind sometimes.

Will it help you program faster and bug free? Probably not, will it improve your mental model of programming languages, probably. Will you enjoy learning abstract things, if you like solving math puzzles, probably, otherwise probably not.

It's hard to express the 'powers' it gives you, it's like spending much time thinking about simple things that usually you just use without thinking about.

As a crude example, the scope of a variable shared between two lambda function that is not shared with the global space.

Sorry that I don't have a specific example in mind, I feel like the 'power' is just spending enough time thinking on complex things.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#73

Post by slifin »

nine_k wrote: post #19
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…

Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript. Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mu…

Plenty of ways to define complex data shapes in Clojure

Spec is definitely underrated here considering it's built into the language and has a wider scope but for most people they want the intellisense experience which you can get with clj-kondo + mailli but is not built in so most teams don't use it, fair enough

I'd like to move the goal posts though and say I want flowstorm in every (any other?!) language

I can just run the program and scrub backwards and forwards through the execution and look at all the immutable values frame by frame with a high level UI with plenty of search/autocomplete options

For program understanding there's nothing better

The fact I can program against the timeline of values of my program and create custom UI on top is crazy

One of the most mind blowing demos to me was Bret Victor's inventing on principle and having a programmable reverse debugger for your language makes those demos viable

I built an emulator recently for work that replays what happens on live locally, combined with flowstorm I can go line by line and tell you exactly what happened and why, no print statements no reruns with my own custom UI customised to our apps interesting parts

This is my appeal to anyone outside of Clojure please build flowstorm for JavaScript and or Python

The design of flowstorm is definitely helped by the fact that 95% of Clojure programs are immutable but I don't think it's impossible to replicate just very difficult

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#74

Post by saltcured »

ModernMech wrote: post #27
AlotOfReading wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers. The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem. "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving…

> "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations ... Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. I think the field of programming languages has grown enough that we have to start acknowledging the future of programming largely won't be in t…

I have very mixed feelings on this topic, starting with how you quantify and weigh something like "most used" for a programming language. To me, the claim feels almost as much a non sequitur as saying the most used building material in the western world is Legos blocks or Play-Doh...

Is the most used bridge-building technique a plank over a small culvert, or the properly engineered bridge that carries constant, multi-lane highway traffic for a century? How do we weigh the usage of resulting products into the usage of a design and production method? Should we consider the number of program users? The users X hours of usage?

Fundamentally, the software field is still just so young and we haven't teased apart the "obvious" different domains and domain rules that we have for production of different material goods. In some sense, the domains and domain rules for material goods emerge out of the connection to culture, economic roles, health, and safety aspects. Whether it falls into civil engineering, building codes, transporation rules, consumer product safety, food and drug, ...

The self-similar way that software can be composed into systems also makes it confusing to categorize. Imagine if we talked about other crafts the same way, and conflated textile manufacturing, clothing design, tailoring, costume making, wardrobe management, scripting, choreography, acting, and dancing as a single field that coordinates the visual movement of fabric on a stage.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#75

Post by evdubs »

bccdee wrote: post #71
evdubs wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python. Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions…

That's a bad thing, though. You should not be `eval`-ing your config file, much less untrusted messages.

I am not so sure how it works, but you can define your own evaluation handler for `eval` which, I assume, can be as restrictive as you need if you're dealing with untrusted data.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#76

Post by moffkalast »

> A big chunk of our code was doing things that are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software did things our competitors’ software couldn’t do.

I've never seen a general purpose programming language that couldn't do everything the underlying hardware is capable of. It could only be unperformant enough that you could call it unfeasible at worst. What's so hard to do in languages other than Lisp? Spam parentheses?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#77

Post by philipwhiuk »

xigoi wrote: post #35
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.

You’re assuming that people choose languages based on merit and not based on how much money someone will give them for using them.

You're assuming something better on merit wouldn't make more money as a result, and I'm questioning the actual merits as a result

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#79

Post by didibus »

chihuahua wrote: post #39
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #23

A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness. This is a profound misapp…

It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions. Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp. Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the s…

I don't think the article argues for superior solutions, but I understand how it can feel as such.

I think it's just trying to say there's another dimension, the meta-level enabled by macros and Lisp's syntax that opens up the possibility of new solutions, which may or may not be better, as that's so context dependent.

But what I feel it's saying is you can't even begin to imagine solutions that leverage this new dimension without learning about it and getting to grip with it mentally.

In that sense, it's saying when you don't know, you can't even explore the space of solutions at that higher dimension, not necessarily that they're better for all problems.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#80

Post by bccdee »

evdubs wrote: post #75
bccdee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad thing, though. You should not be `eval`-ing your config file, much less untrusted messages.

I am not so sure how it works, but you can define your own evaluation handler for `eval` which, I assume, can be as restrictive as you need if you're dealing with untrusted data.

Seems simpler just to use `json.load`.
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