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Lisp is still a secret weapon

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Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#91

Post by Guthur »

agentultra wrote: post #88

> Clojure hit the scene as a modern lisp that embraced the JVM. > By now, Clojure is the de facto standard lisp for new applications. What's with the whole, "modern," meme when people talk about Clojure? SBCL only forked off from CMU CL in 1999. Clozure CL is still well supported and actively developed. It's not like CL was written in the 1960s and had never changed ever since. The final standard was published in 199…

I too would love to know the basis of the "Modern Lisp" meme. There is very little in Clojure that has not been done before.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#92

Post by dllthomas »

Guthur wrote: post #91
agentultra wrote: post #88

> Clojure hit the scene as a modern lisp that embraced the JVM. > By now, Clojure is the de facto standard lisp for new applications. What's with the whole, "modern," meme when people talk about Clojure? SBCL only forked off from CMU CL in 1999. Clozure CL is still well supported and actively developed. It's not like CL was written in the 1960s and had never changed ever since. The final standard was published in 199…

I too would love to know the basis of the "Modern Lisp" meme. There is very little in Clojure that has not been done before.

In general, I would not expect something "modern" to be doing new things, but doing everything that has come to be expected and doing it well.

I have no opinion that I would defend as to the degree to which that applies to Clojure.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#93

Post by incepted »

Guthur wrote: post #90
incepted wrote: post #85

It's not secret, it's just that everybody who knows about it chooses not to use it. Additionally, the fact that it's dynamically typed probably seals its fate (which is already pretty darned sealed).

How does being dynamically typed seal it's fate? Dynamic typing does not seem to be on the way out at all, cases in point; Javascript (everywhere), Python, Ruby to name the big ones.

Javascript will probably be around for a while but Python and Ruby have been constantly shrinking in mind share and buzz these past years (mostly because of Go but also because there are now faster, statically typed languages that subsume them).

The simple truth is that statically typed languages have been much better at improving in areas where dynamically typed languages used to be the only ones shining than the other way around.

In a few years, we'll look back at dynamically typed languages with the same fondness as we do Pascal: it was a good idea at the time but we do better now.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#94

Post by Guthur »

incepted wrote: post #93
Guthur wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does being dynamically typed seal it's fate? Dynamic typing does not seem to be on the way out at all, cases in point; Javascript (everywhere), Python, Ruby to name the big ones.

Javascript will probably be around for a while but Python and Ruby have been constantly shrinking in mind share and buzz these past years (mostly because of Go but also because there are now faster, statically typed languages that subsume them). The simple truth is that statically typed languages have been much better at improving in areas where dynamically typed languages used to be the only ones shining than the ot…

For what figures there are your claim has no basis.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Top 10 is full of dynamic languages, Go is not in the top 20 and all the languages you claim are fading are climbing in this particular metric.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#95

Post by byron_fast »

Scarbutt wrote: post #36
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I wonder if Graham was presented with the same problem today, will he pick a lisp and write everything from scratch or pick up a less "expressive" language because it has a strong and mature ecosystem of libs.

The reason Paul Graham used Lisp is it was the only reasonable way at the time to implement RTML, which was the HTML macro language with online editor that Viaweb was built out of. RTML was how every website in Viaweb was constructed, it is what allowed them to move quickly and customers to customize with unequaled flexibility.

It was their key competitive advantage and Lisp was critical to its creation and function. It would be foolish to attempt to implement RTML in something else. Perhaps slightly less foolish in 2015 but not by much.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#96

Post by jwr »

Guthur wrote: post #91
agentultra wrote: post #88

> Clojure hit the scene as a modern lisp that embraced the JVM. > By now, Clojure is the de facto standard lisp for new applications. What's with the whole, "modern," meme when people talk about Clojure? SBCL only forked off from CMU CL in 1999. Clozure CL is still well supported and actively developed. It's not like CL was written in the 1960s and had never changed ever since. The final standard was published in 199…

I too would love to know the basis of the "Modern Lisp" meme. There is very little in Clojure that has not been done before.

As a long time Common Lisper, allow me to disagree. The STM and concurrency features of Clojure are what brought me in, and they certainly haven't been "done before". Common Lisp's concurrency story was always poor.

You could also argue that the effects of lazy evalutation and transducers could have been achieved before using SERIES package, but then you surely haven't tried to actually use and debug SERIES code.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#97

Post by bjterry »

worldsayshi wrote: post #3

But we need types people! Properly static ones that can be used to encode your intentions and handle inconsistency before even running the program. And yes I know that Clojure has an optional type system. But optional means that you cannot rely on having types in the libraries that you use. So you can't fit your stuff together with their stuff and have reasonable expectations that it will work once the user does that…

Perhaps the ideal language would be one where every library is statically typed, either through social or technological means, but the application language is optionally typed. This would be a pretty big departure from most normal languages, but with opinionated languages like Go (which comes with its own code formatter) existing, it's not too crazy.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#98

Post by nnq »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #35
agumonkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes hand in hand. Back in the days people said lisp in newbies hands will be backfire, but handled by those with abstraction skills it will give you ability to express things you cannot with other systems. Many here agree that technology should not matter, but it does at one point. Some trait of the culture behind and around languages are very very important. Lisp tree recursion, "lexicality" and ad-hoc genericit…

I'm not really a programmer. All my training is in abstract math so whenever I see people arguing over language X and Y it always seems weird to me. I don't write code until I've sketched things out with pencil and paper and by necessity I have to disentagle the syntax of the language from the essence of the problem. Turns out when I do things that way translating the solution back into a language X ends up being the…

> just shifts how I encode the solution

And this is actually the most important thing in industry software development.

It affects:

1. how easy it is to modify an existing codebase: eg., can you add feature X before your competitor even after you app grew to 1M LOC?

2. how easy it is for a new developer to start working productively on you codebase

3. how stable your software is: do modifications introduce subtle bugs that make the whole thing more and more unstable until it becomes unusable?

4. how secure your software is: how easy (read "cost effective") is it to write secure code without having to take 10x longer to do this?

From a business perspective, the "fundamental bottleneck is always what's in your head" problem can always be solved by temporarily hiring a few super-smart consultants with "bigger heads" that can get over this bottleneck, the rare times when you have the problem...

The rest of the time, the "shape of your code" is 100x times more important than the abstract formulation of an elegant solution. Because what you do 99% of the time is "re-shaping" existing code to do slightly different versions of what it already does, not solving interesting problems...

So yeah, at this level, languages can make all the difference!

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#99

Post by pjmlp »

sheepmullet wrote: post #73
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

> but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfortable with and how good of a problem solver you are. Techniques and concepts influence your ability to reason about problems. If you don't understand dictionaries (hashes), or trees, or macros, or reflection, or first class functions etc, then you will think about a problem very differently. If you understand the concepts then you can usually get a…

That's why CS matters.

Anyone with a good CS background can think abstractly in terms of algorithms and data structures, instead of focusing in language X with feature list Y.

Re: Lisp is still a secret weapon

#100

Post by nnq »

Scarbutt wrote: post #36
dkarapetyan wrote: post #25

Here are some heretical thoughts. The language is irrelevant. The text editor is irrelevant. The OS is irrelevant. The size of your monitor is irrelevant. All your productivity hacks are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is your ability to formulate and solve problems. You might say the language can help with both the formulation and the solution but I'd say that just comes down to what language you're most comfort…

I wonder if Graham was presented with the same problem today, will he pick a lisp and write everything from scratch or pick up a less "expressive" language because it has a strong and mature ecosystem of libs.

At the time when PG was solving a web development problem, web development problems were "new and interesting", so it made sense to use a Lisp.

Nowadays it probably doesn't make sense to use Lisps for web, but it would absolutely make sense if you are solving something that is actually a new and interesting problem nowadays...

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