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Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

logicaltypes.blogspot.com

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Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#81

Post by pjmlp »

wisty wrote: post #15
nostrademons wrote: post #3

Dylan was my favorite language back in college. I remember following PG's essays to Lisp, and then Lisp to all the newer dialects like Dylan or Goo. Dylan had it all: a metaobject protocol, generic functions, optional static typing, infix macros . I even got started working on an Eclipse plugin for it, which I ended up shelving after like 3 weeks when I lost interest. Unfortunately, there are large network effects to…

I don't really think it's purely tooling that's the issue. If it were so easy to use Dylan, then the tooling would be easy to write. I think it's performance. "Scripting languages" tear compiled languages apart when it comes to iterating. Write a "hello world" web app page in Python and Scala, then see which one takes 30 seconds and about a gig of RAM to actually display in the browser. On the other hand, if you need…

Back when Dylan was being developed, C and C++ compilers produced bloated slow code on home computers. Assembly was the only path for real performance.

We were blessed with choice of having compilers for systems programing for Pascal dialects, Modula-2, Oberon, Basic dialects, Forth...

Somehow along the way the UNIXification of the enterprise brought the wrath of C into these other ecosystems.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#82

Post by foldr »

ohyes wrote: post #68
georgegeorges wrote: post #24

If you're going to rant, you might want to actually have a clear point to make. > college kids on comp.lang.lisp asking for the answers for problem-set 3 on last night's homework Surely not during the Naggum days. CLL was a hostile wasteland. > That is the lesson of perl and python and all these other languages. They're not good for anything. They suck. And they suck in libraries and syntax and semantics and weirdnes…

> You have to have your head pretty far up your own ass to not see how much Common Lisp sucks. It's a language designed by committee, and it looks like it. Erh, no. You don't seem to have any historical insight into how common lisp came to be. (Or maybe you do have historical insight and are just being willfully ignorant). It is a language designed by a set of companies and institutions compromising 25 years ago. Com…

Your comment is a bit confusing because you're basically explaining how Common Lisp was indeed a language designed by committee containing all sorts of compromises between competing vendors. That's what the OP was getting at.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#83

Post by lmm »

Diederich wrote: post #80
chrismonsanto wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? How have you not heard of CPAN? There is not a single language in the world that can touch Perl's libraries. That's a really outdated meme. CPAN is small, pretty much every language you hear about regularly has a larger package space than CPAN. Even Go's package space is bigger than CPAN's. JS and Java each have package spaces roughly 3x CPAN's size. http://www.modulecounts.com/

https://metacpan.org/recent There are a couple of CPAN module installers, and every one of them, by default, will not install the target module if there are any test failures. Honest question: are there any other languages that do that? I last looked a few years ago, and it didn't seem to be the case.

Maven will not, by default, allow you to perform a release if there are any test failures. That seems like a better model, at least for a VM language - if something works on the release machine and not on the user's machine, you have bigger problems.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#84

Post by lmm »

ohyes wrote: post #68
georgegeorges wrote: post #24

If you're going to rant, you might want to actually have a clear point to make. > college kids on comp.lang.lisp asking for the answers for problem-set 3 on last night's homework Surely not during the Naggum days. CLL was a hostile wasteland. > That is the lesson of perl and python and all these other languages. They're not good for anything. They suck. And they suck in libraries and syntax and semantics and weirdnes…

> You have to have your head pretty far up your own ass to not see how much Common Lisp sucks. It's a language designed by committee, and it looks like it. Erh, no. You don't seem to have any historical insight into how common lisp came to be. (Or maybe you do have historical insight and are just being willfully ignorant). It is a language designed by a set of companies and institutions compromising 25 years ago. Com…

Sure, 25 years ago there were good reasons for the design compromises of Common Lisp. But that doesn't mean they make sense today, where "Windows or Unix" is pretty much the world, and there are any number of consistent, elegant languages that work on both.

> All this said, Common Lisp (and Scheme, and it's implementations) have features that the general programming community is still rediscovering 30 years later.

A language is more than an accumulation of features. It doesn't matter how advanced an implementation is if it's not actually pleasant to program in.

> Dismissing it as something that sucks because the people involved didn't try hard enough is incredibly myopic.

I don't think anyone's saying they didn't try hard enough. But interop between CL and the rest of the world is undeniably poor - and this largely seems to be a deliberate choice by the CL community - and it's not much of a stretch to say that its unpopularity is a result of this.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#85

Post by bainsfather »

eudox wrote: post #2

The article hits rather close to home, as someone who, for better or worse, is committed to improving Common Lisp's ecosystem. I often feel this existential dread of "Is it worth it? Whose lives will it change? Will I spend years labouring in obscurity for nothing?". And while the answer to all those questions is probably not what I'd like to hear, I still do it. This is why ecosystems are, for most people, more valu…

Hi eudox, I would love to use CL for my projects - I've read (most of) Norvig's and Graham's books, written small programs etc. I really like most of the language, especially the 'break into debugger on error'.

But, when I came to write CL for a project that needed gui, web scraping, using APIs etc (i.e. I wanted to connect it to the outside world) I was stumped. Unlike in e.g. python, there was no nice gui library that I could just use. Now maybe people will reply telling me that something exists, but compared to python, the difference in ecosystem is massive. (possibly some commercial CL environment has this, but I am unwilling to pay for something that is closed).

I really want to use CL for more than just toy programs, but I don't/can't.

So, when you are asking yourself "Is it worth it? Whose lives will it change?" - the answer is mine, but only if you think you are able to fix this.

Good luck.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#86

Post by crazypyro »

bainsfather wrote: post #85
eudox wrote: post #2

The article hits rather close to home, as someone who, for better or worse, is committed to improving Common Lisp's ecosystem. I often feel this existential dread of "Is it worth it? Whose lives will it change? Will I spend years labouring in obscurity for nothing?". And while the answer to all those questions is probably not what I'd like to hear, I still do it. This is why ecosystems are, for most people, more valu…

Hi eudox, I would love to use CL for my projects - I've read (most of) Norvig's and Graham's books, written small programs etc. I really like most of the language, especially the 'break into debugger on error'. But, when I came to write CL for a project that needed gui, web scraping, using APIs etc (i.e. I wanted to connect it to the outside world) I was stumped. Unlike in e.g. python, there was no nice gui library t…

I've had good luck using Haskell for similar things that you are describing. Hackage has a good variety of packages that do similar things to beautifulsoup, numpy, pandas, etc. Generally, I've found them to be less built up, but they still provide a decent level of abstraction. Cabal hell is real though.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#87

Post by cwyers »

Jgrubb wrote: post #65
Dolimiter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Languages don't matter. Platforms matter. APIs matter. Playing nicely with the rest of the world fucking matters." Nice, I like that. Reminds me of the Discourse peeps, who rejected eg PHP, and wrote it in their pet language, ignoring that no-one cares about language, and finding the problem that their platform is so difficult to install and use, that no-one uses their software.

> the Discourse peeps, who rejected eg PHP, and wrote it in their pet language, ignoring that no-one cares about language Are you talking about Ruby/Rails?

The OP is being overly dismissive, but has a point -- there's a market for Ruby, but in terms of most of the use cases for online bulletin board software, both Rails and Postgres are much rarer than PHP and MySQL.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#88

Post by tel »

tempodox wrote: post #70
tel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be likely that 1.0 will hit before this really holds true. In Beta 6 I'm told you can easily crash the compiler with recursive generic ADTs and most have to travel "through" some heap type to compile at all. Furthermore, Swift doesn't support enough laziness/deferral/coalgebraic formulation to have, say, an infinite stream type without breaking GCD. These will probably be fixed in time, but Swift's ADT su…

Wow, where did you get Beta 6? I only have 5.

This is based off comments someone else had on trying to compile some of my experimental Swift modules.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#89

Post by sitkack »

georgegeorges wrote: post #24

If you're going to rant, you might want to actually have a clear point to make. > college kids on comp.lang.lisp asking for the answers for problem-set 3 on last night's homework Surely not during the Naggum days. CLL was a hostile wasteland. > That is the lesson of perl and python and all these other languages. They're not good for anything. They suck. And they suck in libraries and syntax and semantics and weirdnes…

Read the whole post, everything sucks. It is Salinger + PK Dick + Vonnegut + Allan Watts.

Re: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

#90

Post by sitkack »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
eudox wrote: post #2

The article hits rather close to home, as someone who, for better or worse, is committed to improving Common Lisp's ecosystem. I often feel this existential dread of "Is it worth it? Whose lives will it change? Will I spend years labouring in obscurity for nothing?". And while the answer to all those questions is probably not what I'd like to hear, I still do it. This is why ecosystems are, for most people, more valu…

Its even worse for the PL designer inventing something new without even a small ecosystem in place; I ask myself everyday "is it worth it?"

It is worth it. And your case it isn't the language per se, but spreading the ideas. The language is an ephemeral vehicle.
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