The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language

http://jakob.space/blog/thoughts-on-lisps.html

by grugagag • 6 years ago

143 50 6 years ago

pjmlp7• 6 years ago

Very entertaining article, just a small remark when people count pages in Common Lisp or C++ standards, they tend to forget that standard library is also part of those pages.

Something like Python. .NET, Java also isn't far from them, when language + standard library + vm reference (if any) land in dead tree form.

bhaak• 6 years ago

when language + standard library + vm reference (if any) land in dead tree form.

I find that comment quite funny, considering that the Java specifications came out in dead tree form already for Java 1.0. :-)

imtringued• 6 years ago

I've never understood why anyone uses the number of pages of the reference document as an argument. It feels like making fun of the hard work of people put into making the reference. The bulk of the reference probably consists of minor details that can be skipped but can also be extremely helpful when you actually need them. Should we make worse references just to appease some bean counting?

shakow• 6 years ago

I've never understood why anyone uses the number of pages of the reference document as an argument

I guess that, assuming that all refs have roughly the same information density, it gives a rough idea of the “size” of the language.

KineticLensman• 6 years ago

the hard work of people put into making the reference

In my 1990 edition of Steele's Common Lisp, The Language, even the index is a work of love.

[Example spoiler] After the entry for Michelangelo (turtle), who is mentioned on page 440, the page numbers for Michelangelo (artist) are 1475-1564.

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

At least in C++ - after the initial spec, the language was literally _built_ on exploiting those minor details. A lot, if not most, of C++'s magic and its ugliness goes through those weird minor details.

tsarfox• 6 years ago

Author, here. The n ≈ 163 pages figure I give for R6RS includes the standard library and description of formal semantics.

I'd like to clarify that I didn't mean to imply that larger standards are worse. Quite the opposite, actually. That's why I enjoy R6RS. As shakow pointed out, it's a means of giving a rough estimate of size. Common Lisp has much more than Scheme in terms of what's included.

rcarmo• 6 years ago

I went down this rabbit hole last year: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/06/20/2310

I fared a bit better with Gerbil, enough to build multi-arch Docker images for it: https://github.com/insightfulsystems/ubuntu-gerbil

These days I mess around with Janet a bit, and quite like Fennel, but lack the time to do substantial bits of code in either.

Santosh83• 6 years ago

Clojure's license makes it a complete non starter for me, sorry. Live free or die.

Can someone ELI5 this? Why is Clojure's license problematic?

yomly• 6 years ago

I am by no means an expert on things to do with licensing but Clojure is under Eclipse so IIRC if you distribute your code onto the user's machine they have a right to the source.

This can make on-prem solutions for a product slightly hairy.

Please feel free to correct me if this is inaccurate

dkersten5• 6 years ago

This can make on-prem solutions for a product slightly hairy.

EPL has the restriction that if you distribute binaries, you have to make the source available (you must state in your license where to obtain it). It seems that listing your dependencies libraries and linking to their websites (which I think is good practice anyway even with less restrictive licenses) would be enough, as long as you didn’t modify them.

EPL allows linked modules to be distributed under whatever license you want, so in a commercial product doesn’t apply to your closed source code or any libraries that choose not to be distributed under EPL.

So for on prem distribution, you just need to include a license file that lists all of your EPL (or other licenses that require the license to be included like MIT) with a link to where to get the code. Your own code is unaffected.

This isn’t GPL compatible, though, because GPL does “infect” linked modules too.

However IANAL.

kgwgk• 6 years ago

Not GPL-compatible:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/hupqhn/the_many_faces...

pjmlp7• 6 years ago

Given the amount of surviving GPL software that still has some meaning, basically Linux kernel and GCC are the ones left, that reasoning won't hold for long.

bzb3• 6 years ago

Actually, that's a good point I hadn't thought of. The world has moved on from GPL to more free alternatives.

agambrahma• 6 years ago

Emacs Lisp, or Elisp, is generally hated

That seems unnecessary; of all the options above, it might be the one seeing the /most/ active development, and (given that "Guile-macs" isn't happening anytime soon) will continue to be in active development for a long time to come.

alpaca1283• 6 years ago

Yes, it's not ideal because of its lack of tail call optimisation, but as a Vim user I'm kind of envious now and then when I try to write a custom function myself.

Then again afaik Vim doesn't throw errors when you have a bracket imbalance in comments(!), so that's nice.

minerjoe• 6 years ago

errors ... bracket imbalance in comments

Not sure where this is coming from. Elisp doesn't error on anything in comments.

saurik• 6 years ago

I read this, and then went and read the article, and was expecting it to be hating on Elisp, but in fact the article defends it; FWIW, Elisp is generally hated, and that is one of the first (unfortunate) things I think of when I hear it come up in a conversation, so given that this author does not seem to agree I don't see anything wrong with this statement.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Elisp is popular, but not likely through any strength of the language. Emacs' rich history of people writing crazy extensions is just so compelling it can't be avoided.

There isn't really an argument for why a text editor needs its own different brand of lisp vs. using Common Lisp with a dedicated library for the Emacs interpretation of how text works. It only ended up this way from inertia. But it is nevertheless extremely telling that the only major implementation of Elisp is Emacs.

ache7• 6 years ago

About that "write-ppm" example. Using PPM type 3 will increase the size of pixel data by 2-4 times. Use type 6.

cafard• 6 years ago

I clicked just be sure that it wasn't COBOL....

pjmlp7• 6 years ago

Well, modern COBOL supports RAII, collections, OOP, .NET/JVM backends in addition to AOT to native code, ....

waffletower• 6 years ago

"Clojure's license makes it a complete non starter for me, sorry. Live free or die."

I don't think you understand what the word "free" means.

timdeve• 6 years ago

If you are interested in game development and lisp, may I suggest having a look at https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp ? It's "A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications.", the Gitter is quite friendly as well.

The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language

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