Qi, arc competitor? Qi is lisp for 21st century.

http://www.lambdassociates.org/

by npk • 19 years ago

8 15 19 years ago

ecuzzillo• 19 years ago

It sounds to be wasting a lot of time proving things about programming, when the spirit of Lisp is usually much more test-driven and not proving things. The stated goal is so that you can go about your normal business, but PROVABLY! I'd say this is much more in the spirit of ML than the spirit of Lisp.

busy_beaver• 19 years ago

Tcl/Tk? For the 21st century?

Ummm.. okay.

davidw2• 19 years ago

Tcl and Tk are very nice systems, which were done in by bad marketing and leadership.

See this article:

http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html

omouse3• 19 years ago

It also looks ugly by default.

amichail• 19 years ago

From Qi's designer, Mark Tarver

"Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University"

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm

whacked_new• 19 years ago

A good read! Tarver writes extremely well. And while it echos the voices of what sounds clearly like a cynic, it's pretty convincing and concerning. Sad thing is those concerned few are usually those who don't play by the rules and you end up with little might. But what the hell, someone's gotta fight.

ryantmulligan• 19 years ago

Any competitor is a good thing. It will either cause Arc to move faster, or just be better than it. The pattern matching simplifications seem quite slick.

npk2• 19 years ago

I agree, ML style pattern matching seems so elegant. My favorite pattern matching system is actually Mathematica. I wish more programming languages had 'em :)

palish• 19 years ago

They go on about type checking. The point of dynamically typed languages is that they're dynamically typed.

omouse3• 19 years ago

I don't like the case-sensitive symbols. Nor do I like the implicit quote on symbols...it doesn't make much sense to me but that might because there aren't many good code samples on the site.

Is it too much to ask for a nice looking website with lots of good code samples? And a reference link for all the functions that work in the language would be nice.

As much as some people dislike newLISP, it at least has a good clear/concise website: http://newlisp.org/ The purpose is clearly stated, and right away you know on what it can run and where to look for comparisons to other Lisps.

Not much of a competitor to Arc in my opinion. But pg, please show us some more Arc code :P

Goladus• 19 years ago

I'm no lisper but it seems to me that the implicit quote and the resulting need to use square brackets to delineate lists would make it more difficult to write macros.

omouse3• 19 years ago

It depends on how he's defined the implicit quote syntax. You could make it so it doesn't have any effect in a def-macro call or something but that increases complexity just a tiny bit for a feature that doesn't do much for the developer.

Off-topic-ish: The square brackets are kind of neat but not for that purpose. If instead he allowed the interchange of square brackets and parenthesis, i.e. (+ 2 [ 3 2]), that would be neat and useful...it would allow someone to differentiate between nested lists slightly. And of course, it's easier to click [ instead of Shift+[ to get ( :p

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shiro• 19 years ago

I suspect the need of special syntax for list construction came from the introduction of currying. If you want currying you need to know arity of procedures, so you lose variable arity procedures such as 'list'.

Qi, arc competitor? Qi is lisp for 21st century.

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