Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment

https://github.com/tamamu/darkmatter

by cddadr • 9 years ago

180 130 9 years ago

github.com

21• 9 years ago

Can somebody comment on the status of Lisp in 2017?

If one were to learn a functional language, is Lisp a good choice today? Or is Haskell more appropiate?

nikki93• 9 years ago

There are many Lisps, they are not always like MLy languages like Haskell. Practical Common Lisp -> On Lisp -> Let Over Lambda with Keene and AMOP on the side are good for Common Lisp. Clojure has good resources too, Professional Clojure, Learning ClojureScript. For Haskell, CIS194 online from UPenn is good. I would suggest trying everything out and not being limited by what others think and the limits on what they can communicate to you with language. Where we are going we need your full expression.

cosarara97• 9 years ago

Lisp is not used as a purely functional language. It has the tools to write functional programs, but most lisp code is procedural.

throwaway7645• 9 years ago

A very tough question. We would need to know more of your background. Haskell is purely functional, with anything impure cast as a monad I think. OCaml is nice and let's you use OO as well. F# is basically OCaml on .NET. Common Lisp is multi-paradigm (imperative, functional, OO, even logic)...there are several others as well. Clojure is a lisp on the JVM that tries to be just functional, but allows you to leverage Java libraries when needed. Clojure has a lot of good things going for it, but I understand that the debugging experience is inferior to Common Lisp as you mainly get Java stack traces. So do you develop on Mac, Linux, or Windows? Do you already know Java? Do you need multicore parallel programming? How much time do you have to invest?

kbp11• 9 years ago

Lisp isn't really a functional language, it just pioneered a lot of concepts in functional programming. It has almost no concept of immutability, imperative code is everywhere, and if you try to write in a pure functional style you'll probably find it awkward compared to something like an ML-style language.

Lisp is a multiparadigm language. It has closures and higher order functions and uses them where they make sense; it also has a lot of imperative constructs, and a very sophisticated object system. They all work together and make Lisp a unique, interesting language. If you're only interested in the functional parts, you'd probably be happier with Haskell or Clojure.

kronos292963• 9 years ago

Clojure is lisp actually. It is also mutable but it makes mutability as an explicit transaction but the entire thing runs on a JVM so you can use all Java libraries (so no library scarcity for lisps). So if you are doing heavy work it is either this or Common lisp. Clojure is preferable because Java has more momentum than CL.

doall18• 9 years ago

The original LISP is pure functional in the sense that you don't change state of an object.

girzel2• 9 years ago

As far as tooling goes, it's also much less of a pain to set up than it used to be. Quicklisp and Roswell[0] make installing and maintaining systems much easier -- together they're kind of like pyenv/pip for Python, or Opam for Ocaml, or what have you.

[0] https://github.com/roswell/roswell

xfer3• 9 years ago

Since you didn't say Common Lisp, i would suggest looking at racket: very powerful macro system with safety, support for static-type checking, contracts. Unlike common-lisp racket is mostly functional and has decent support for object-oriented programming too. Most importantly excellent documentation. Pretty much the best environment, i have seen academic people produce.

peatmoss3• 9 years ago

Also, DrRacket. While I generally prefer my emacs, "first learn emacs" is a pretty bitter pill to swallow for newcomers. Fortunately DrRacket solves that for both newcomers as well as experienced folk who just don't want to use emacs. Introducing folks to Racket seems to have a lower impedance threshold as a result.

DrRacket looks a little dated in its vanilla configuration, but the layout of the editor / REPL parts can be changed around a bit, the color schemes swapped out. There's even a paredit mode for DrRacket. Overall, if I were somehow coding more exclusively in Racket, I could easily see using and extending DrRacket rather than my current emacs.

reikonomusha• 9 years ago

Professional and open source implementations of Common Lisp are stable but nonetheless under active development.

Many hobbyists and professionals use Lisp to solve their problems and make money.

IDEs are in a sorry state. If you're an Emacs user, you'll be happy. Otherwise, unless you spend hundreds of dollars for a professional IDE, you won't have much. Editing Lisp requires a good IDE.

oblio4• 9 years ago

Any recommendations for a Lisp IDE outside of Emacs?

Also, aren't there any other OSS or free Lisp IDEs outside of Emacs? Or are they all crap?

guicho271828• 9 years ago

just look at slimv

vram22• 9 years ago

Many hobbyists and professionals use Lisp to solve their problems and make money.

Is there anywhere that one can read about such cases? Would be interesting to read about both how well they are doing and what sort of apps they use Lisp for making.

slightlyCyborg2• 9 years ago

The stability of something like SBCL feels nice after a year in Clojure.

kronos292963• 9 years ago

Haskell is the pureset functional language. If you want to learn the principles behind the functional programming paradigm learn haskell but its hard. The effort is worth it. But there are situations where the performance is worse compared to other languages but it is the best place to learn FP.

If you are hacking on stuff or doing it as a hobby, learn Scheme. Something like Chicken Scheme is good. Small concise language but a great scarcity of libraries. If you want a pretty ide for scheme or write your own scheme use Racket.

If you want production code in lisp with good library support use Common Lisp. Clojure is better because of better functional programming features than CL but debugging requires knowledge of Java as it runs on a JVM but the plus is you can seamlessly call java libraries which are numerous (more than what is in CL).

OCaml is functional programming with Objects. It it used where there is a need for performance like compilers with the advantage of a functional paradigm. But OCaml is a pain to work with for any Non Unix systems. F# is functional programming for dotNet. Then there is Scala which runs on JVM like Clojure and so has the same pros and cons except Scala is closer to OCaml and Haskell than to Lisp.(ML family)

Depending on your platform make your choice. OCaml is horrible for Windows. Haskell works. Scala and Clojure just need java so platform makes no difference. Schemes mostly have an interpreter for most platforms. Make your choice.

ScottBurson4• 9 years ago

Clojure is better because of better functional programming features than CL

CL now has [shameless plug] an excellent functional collections library, FSet [0]. Using FSet greatly expands the range of algorithms that can easily be written in a functional style. It's been a while since I looked at Clojure, but my impression is that FSet has a substantially richer API, including a bag (multiset) type and many more operations.

I don't know exactly which Clojure features you have in mind, but I suspect that FSet makes CL at least as good for functional programming as Clojure.

[0] https://github.com/slburson/fset

gh02t2• 9 years ago

Don't forget Racket, it's a beautiful language and IMO pretty practical.

pjmlp4• 9 years ago

Can somebody comment on the status of Lisp in 2017?

Sadly the only Lisp environments that resemble in any way the old Lisp Machine or Xerox PARC ones are comercial.

Emacs is kind of ok with SLIME, but it still isn't the same as using Allegro Common Lisp[0] or LispWorks [1].

[0] https://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/

oblio4• 9 years ago

The Lisp Works page is kind of cute, but in bad way as far as marketing goes, at least in my opinion.

The IDE screenshots for Windows show off Windows XP.

fiddlerwoaroof7• 9 years ago

vim + slimv is a pretty good combo, if you're used to vim. Also, although it's not widely used, Atom seems to support slime:

Just grab the latest release from https://github.com/slime/slime/releases Install atom-slime and sbcl (something like brew install sbcl on osx) Point atom to the directory you extracted slime to and then hit packages > slime > start

cadillackness• 9 years ago

I wouldn't recommend Slime to ANYONE because the developers do not care about security. The issue[0] of a gaping security hole has been open for going on two years.

brudgers• 9 years ago

To me, the idea of functional languages seems a bit of the wrong abstraction and functional programming style is a better one. Sure some languages make it easier or harder to program in an imperative or functional (or object oriented) style...I mean it is easier to program in an object oriented programming style using Smalltalk versus Common Lisp (even though CLOS is robust) and much easier to program in an imperative style in C than Haskell due to the way Haskell treats non-idempotentcy.

In 2017 the status of Lisp is about the same as it has always been only more accessible than ever given faster networks over which to download tools and to find documentation...e.g. the Racket ecosystem. And a person who starts exploring one of the Lisps today will learn as much or perhaps more (due to generally better access to diverse information about programming) than at points in the past.

My opinion reflects my bias, but in general I think Lisps are more accessible than Haskell because there has been more time to smooth over the rough edges related to the more significant underlying mathematical/theoretical concepts (lambda calculus versus type theory) and perhaps because lambda calculus is a bit more easily understood than type theory (or perhaps not). There's also a much stronger pedagogical tradition of Lisps as teaching languages (forty years or so) at the undergraduate level than with Haskell.

But in the end, why not both?

WalterGR• 9 years ago

There was a good amount of discussion about what Common Lisp has to offer vs. other programming languages in the comments on this:

The Common Lisp Cookbook

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14661239

262 points by macco 9 days ago | 184 comments

Not so much about CL vs. functional languages, but it gives a sense of the current scuttlebutt about CL.

yogthos• 9 years ago

I would definitely recommend looking at Clojure. It's one of the more widely used functional languages in the industry. There are lots of large companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and Boeing using it for mission critical stuff now.

The fact that it runs on the JVM and makes it easy to interop with existing Java code makes it practical to integrate in many organizations already using this stack.

Jach3• 9 years ago

You might be interested in reading this state of the ecosystem for 2015: http://eudoxia.me/article/common-lisp-sotu-2015 I wouldn't expect things to look any worse since then (an interesting characteristic of Lisp is that unlike say JS materials which are a few years old are often obsolete, there are lots of excellent multi-decade-old Lisp references and code you can still use).

neutronicus• 9 years ago

FWIW, I reached for CL to do some scripting and found using UIOP for filesystem tasks (as recommended here) intensely painful.

slightlyCyborg2• 9 years ago

I am learning Common Lisp after using Clojure exclusively for a year.

Common Lisp may be old, but it is extremely powerful relative to Clojure IMO. Clojure startup times are awful, it takes a very opinionated approach to programming (immutable data), its debugger is buggy, it produces unsightly error messages.

Sure, these problems may be fixed, but for me, I want a powerful tool that I can use now.

I've tried several new hot languages at the time (Rust, Dart, Clojure, Go).

I have come to a point in my career where I want to stick to highly complex, but slightly dusty artifacts defined by a standard( C++ & ANSI Common Lisp).

The SBCL implementation of common lisp does not give me all of the headaches of Clojure. I also don't have to restart the repl to load libs.

On using another dynamic language that isn't a lisp... Forget about it.

...Python maybe for machine learning, but I will probably just wrap cafe in CL or something.

PS. I am 25. Seems relevant to this discussion.

mmargerum• 9 years ago

I have come to a point in my career where I want to stick to highly complex, but slightly dusty artifacts defined by a standard( C++ & ANSI Common Lisp).... . . PS. I am 25. Seems relevant to this discussion.

This made me LOL. I figured you were 50 or older based on the top of your post. You are wise to pick languages that are proven and "just work " though. I would say Go, while young, is incredibly stable and predictable.

vindarel3• 9 years ago

I've been exploring CL lately.

- IMO the documentation state is not great, but it's being worked on. (it's said to be non-existent for Haskell :p ) CL has many books to learn from (CL recipes of 2015 being the more interesting to me http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/), but the online documentation is not brilliant. Often the web page isn't attractive at all, not every project provides good documentation, the "official" websites are bad (cliki, others). It's being fixed by https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl, http://lisp-lang.org/, https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/, http://quickdocs.org/ and http://phoe.tymoon.eu/clus/doku.php

- one can feel the language is dating. It has IMO too many weird semantics: no map and filter but map which takes a second argument telling the type of the structure or mapcar and others, remove-if[-not], etc. Creating hash-tables is too verbose and not consistent, et. That all a lot more are fixed in CL21 http://cl21.org/ (its wiki https://github.com/cl21/cl21/wiki). CL21 also offers more functional-oriented stuff like shorter lambdas, lazy sequences, generic functions, or string interpolation, regexp literals, and more. It's a bit under-documented, but its wiki is ok.

- web dev in CL is another topic. I sugest https://stackoverflow.com/a/42838145/1506338 but what's doable now is very elegant.

- CL has a big ecosystem, we can use Emacs/Vim/Atom, Portacle is straightforward is portable and thus straightforward to use (https://shinmera.github.io/portacle/),…

flavio813• 9 years ago

    Is Lisp a good choice (for a functional language)?

If you want to program in stricly functional and only functional style, being totally forbidden of incorporating side effects into your functions (except via Monads), and want to feel a sensation of "types are checked and enforced everywhere, thus I can sleep happy", then go try Haskell.

If you want to be free to do whatever you need to do, to apply the paradigm you need at every moment -- be it procedural, imperative, logic, aspect-oriented, object-oriented, functional... then Common Lisp is for you. If you need the full power because you know what you are doing, then Common Lisp is for you.

    Status of (Common) Lisp in 2017

- You can have a fully configured, ready to use, CL environment in under 5 minutes by downloading and executing Portacle. No configuration needed, it just runs and gives you Emacs, SLIME, Paredit, SBCL, Quicklisp and other nice tools.

- Free books and resources are available, for example "Practical Common Lisp"

- Package ("system") installation is damn easy with Quicklisp. Download package from the web, compile it and load it... with only one command: (quicklisp:quickload <package name>)

- There are libraries out there for anything you need: REST services, web frameworks (many), JSON, machine learning, math, anything really.

- There are many ANSI-compliant CL implementations out there, most of them free: SBCL, CLISP, Clozure CL, SICL, ABCL, LispWorks (commercial), Allegro CL (commercial)

- Interoperability with C is easy with CFFI (there are other ways as well)

etc etc. Lisp in 2017 is better than ever! - Interoperability with Java is easy with the ABCL implementation.

fiddlerwoaroof7• 9 years ago

This is really cool: now, I'll have a reasonable way to introduce my coworkers to lisp without making them learn emacs at the same time. Anyways, would it be possible to include something like parinfer or paredit here, as well as some reasonable keybindings for them. In vim mode, I find these keybindings extremely ergonomic (loosely based on slimv's settings): https://github.com/fiddlerwoaroof/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs...

kkleindev• 9 years ago

Why would you need to introduce your co-workers to Emacs? I have recently got in touch with clojure and developed in atom with parinfer. Was I missing out on something or is the difference between clojure and common lisp decisive?

throwaway91111• 9 years ago

SLIME is hugely powerful.

fiddlerwoaroof7• 9 years ago

The main reason is that the emacs mode for common lisp is mature and is what almost all CLers use (unless they use a proprietary environment). So, its CL-specific features are generally more polished than other editing environments (e.g. it has a macro stepper, various cross-reference utilities and other such niceties which are either lacking or buggy in other swank clients).

kazinator5• 9 years ago

by cddadr

My TXR Lisp actually has that function. :)

Oops, I mean accessor.

math0ne• 9 years ago

Anyone know of a list or resource that has collected all the of this type of notebook IDE's? I know of a few but I'm sure there are more out there.

brian_herman• 9 years ago

Anyone have any idea on how to get this working with debian?

drdre2001• 9 years ago

What are you having trouble with?

vindarel3• 9 years ago

I made it install with the latest version of Roswell, which I installed with linuxbrew (see wiki) (which compiles quite a bit of dependencies). More precisely ros version 0.0.6 didn't install darkmatter.

But I get a stracktrace indeed, missing "libev.so" which we get with libev-dev.

etiam2• 9 years ago

Is anyone aware of a way to get notebook style Lisp inside Emacs? Along the lines of what EIN does for Python?

I really like the notebook format but I've yet to come across a browser window so good that I'm happy to give up an actual editor program for it.

aardvark179• 9 years ago

Org-mode can be pretty good for that kind of thing with many languages.

gglitch• 9 years ago

With many languages per notebook.

taeric• 9 years ago

As the sibling says, org-mode easily delivers here. In ways that makes standard notebook environments somewhat frustrating with their limitations.

Examples:

You can reference data in a table of your page.

You can access the "session" of a code block in a repl. Useful for putting credentials or other sensitive data in.

You can copy from in a result or a code block with the same ease.

Any tags you have setup will jump as expected. Same for completions and documentation.

Arguably, the way images are referenced externally is better for post processing.

Finally, being able to source control the document easily is huge. Json is a terrible format. :(

etiam2• 9 years ago

Thank you all. It took me a while to get back to this thread and see your replies, but I very much appreciate them.

I'm convinced that you just pushed my over the limit to finally start learning org-mode.

And the examples sound lovely.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

Did the author build a whole notebook environment just for lisp?

Can anyone comment on the benefits of this vs integrating a lisp kernel into jupyther notebook?

Personally I've been wanting to do the ProbMod [0] course, which uses a version of lisp called church, but been wishing for a notebook environment to complete the course in, so this looks very interesting!

[0] https://probmods.org/v1/

cheez• 9 years ago

This was also my question: why not just create a lisp kernel for jupyter?

maxkrieger• 9 years ago

There are a couple dockerized jupyter and beaker kernels for WebPPL if you want a go at v2, but I had varied success with them.

Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment

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