Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2011/04/is-it-lisp-or-is-it-me.html

by lisper • 15 years ago

85 46 15 years ago

rondam.blogspot.com

alexk7• 15 years ago

"A team of competent programmers willing to put up bullshit will out-compete a lone wolf striving for elegance no matter how brilliant he is."

I'm doomed.

agentultra• 15 years ago

A brilliant anecdote, yet I am curious how you can still believe in the dreaded "lisp curse," after experiencing so much success with it.

Is it an attribute of Lisp that there exists a mythical lone-wolf that seeks to produce software so pure and elegant that no mere mortal can possibly understand it? Is it an attribute of Lisp that this lone-wolf, like a by-gone action hero, prefers to work alone?

Lisp, like any sufficiently useful language, simply gives you enough rope. It's good, sturdy, and well-tested rope. You could probably climb a mountain with it. Or hang yourself. Your pick. The rope has very little to do with it.

dman• 15 years ago

If there is one feature in lisp that might fit that category it would be macros. They are great for single programmer productivity while I have seen people who worked in large teams complain about lisp macros. However like every other feature macros could be minimized by the companies coding style handbook.

lisper4• 15 years ago

I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team players go off and use C/Perl/Ruby/Python/whatever because those communities are full of other team players. As a result, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and the team players win, even though as individuals they may be generally less productive/smart/whatever.

On those rare occasions when Lisp programmers manage to all row together in the same direction they can produce some truly spectacular results (Viaweb, ITA, RAX). But those seem to be the exceptions.

swannodette• 15 years ago

Which is why I have high hopes for Racket and Clojure - less NIH syndrome, more libraries, friendlier communities, and a healthy respect for good ideas from a wide variety of programming languages, not just Lisp.

6ren2• 15 years ago

Have you ever found it difficult to understand someone else's lisp project, because they have customized the language so much? (or vice versa, has a fellow lisper found your code hard to understand)

I wonder if the flexibility and power of lisp might work against co-operation in this way too.

I've witnessed confusion caused by operator-overloading in C++ (I heard that that's common); lisp is more customizable.

crpatino• 15 years ago

Team players go off and use Python? Who would have thought!!!

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Lisp has this convenient nature that it is better than every language, yet under its own weight it has nothing to show for it.

Maybe I can start a similar myth with Logo. It requires no proof. Simply one or two anecdotes, great hubris, and the ability to say with a straight face that the reason why everyone who uses it isn't productive is because we're geniuses. Anyone else in?

quasi2• 15 years ago

I am sure there are other success stories which are not heard. At Cleartrip we had a largish team of Common Lisp programers. We became from new entrant to a number 2 position with software written in Common Lisp. So many myths about lisp were proven plain wrong. * you need to be brilliant to write lisp - none of us were "super" lisp programers with years of experience. We had common sense and nice simple code. * hard to learn lisp - not any more than, say, ruby. Out of the 10 odd lispers we had only 2 had CL exposure. The rest learned on the go. Whichever language / platform you use you have to train your team if they are fresh. * Lisp is slow - haha. * Lisp software is hard to run - haha again. we had months of uptime and we could patch our servers on the go. * Lispers are pricks - We were all normal people who worked together well. Lispers, Ruby guys, JS guys - all.

But still everything was not rosy. * When we started, documentation was a huge problem. We would never have got approved except for Edi, who's efforts were an inspiration and a basis of our stuff. * Library support was sparse. Now it is a lot better. But the community is small. Not that they are all pricks, but they are stretched too thin. If I have seen anything, if they use lisp for work, most of them have to fight daily battles against the anti-lisp crowd which will not look rationally at any good work you have done. * Library management - now much better because of quicklisp (thanks Zach) * For most people lack of a usual ORM and a MVC framework was unthinkable. CLSQL has been a pain point.

Programming in the Lisp environment, with the REPL, is a pleasure. I have had to do php after than and O-M-G - its horrible. All I will say to other fellow Lispers - The naysayers are always present. Trust your instinct. You will enjoy life better if you are able to love what you do.

(Cleartrip does not run on CL now. Java, I think. Because of reasons other than technical IMHO.)

numeromancer• 15 years ago

This response was much more substantial than the original article.

To say that the original article was "about" Lisp, or the Lisp Genius, would be akin to my saying that there are fleas "about" my dog.

BTW: I wonder if Rondam(?) knows this guy: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

cpr• 15 years ago

Same person. He changed his name a while back.

bad_user• 15 years ago

Not that I don't agree with some of the points raised, but the article's purpose is to be a refutation to this claim:

     There are genius programmers who write Lisp, 
     and Lisp may suit them well. But these same folks
     would also be able to accomplish amazing things in 
     other languages.

Languages and tools are not created equal, but the author assumes he's one of those geniuses, which may not be the case.

Extraordinary developers do extraordinary things, regardless of the tools used. Here's an example, using as reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history

The development of Git began on April 3, 2005. The project was announced on April 6, and became self-hosting as of April 7. The first merge of multiple branches was done on April 18. Torvalds achieved his performance goals; on April 29, the nascent Git was benchmarked recording patches to the Linux kernel tree at the rate of 6.7 per second.

And here's the kicker: Linus would probably be more productive in LISP, but would he bring more value to the world? Probably not, as churning out code is not Linus' strength -- he outcompetes everyone by superior design, by pragmatism and by being a good team-leader.

That's the type of developer I admire -- people that kick-ass in bringing value and making sacrifices is part of that. Sometimes you have the luxury of picking up a new language (Ruby) and invent a new web framework with it (Rails), sometimes you don't. Either way, code talks bullshit walks (so to speak).

lisper4• 15 years ago

> the author assumes he's one of those geniuses

Exactly the opposite actually. Not only do I not assume that, I specifically deny it.

SeanDav• 15 years ago

Actually, even though you deny that you are a genius I think you are. I don't think your article refutes the original article by John Cook at all as you are one of the very small percentage of people that can "make things happen" in Lisp or any other language.

I would suggest you are too much of an engineer to use an "inferior" tool like C++ or Java because you know there is something "better" otherwise I am sure you would achieve equally spectacular results in other languages.

GrooveStomp• 15 years ago

Actually, the author pretty much explicitly states that he's not one of those geniuses.

"That still leaves open the possibility that I'm just freakin' brilliant, I could have (and would have) produced the same results in any old programming language. But there is actual data to refute that theory."

However, instead of invalidating his argument, he uses this to illustrate why Lisp is largely responsible for his success and why you don't have to be a genius to be attracted to Lisp or to benefit from using it.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

> Linus would probably be more productive in LISP

...

> he outcompetes everyone by superior design, by pragmatism and by being a good team-leader.

On their face, these statements seem contradictory, don't they? How is it pragmatic to turn down a tool that yields better productivity?

randallsquared• 15 years ago

How is it pragmatic to turn down a tool that yields better productivity?

Because individual productivity is not the most important thing when you have dozens or hundreds of people contributing to a project... or want to have dozens or hundreds of people contributing to your project. It may not be important at all, frankly.

Clever, compact code and extendable, maintainable code are often at odds, and lisps allow you to write very clever, very compact code in comparison to, say, Java and PHP. Or, probably, C, but I haven't written much C, so I won't opine on it. :)

cdavid• 15 years ago

It is dubious whether Linus would be more productive using LISP. I mean, git is based around the idea of being super close to the metal, with a consistant focus on speed. We are talking about people who say (and can reasonably claim !) that java is too slow because it does not support unsigned integers...

"being a genius programmer", whatever that means, is not a one dimension thing, and people can excel at some things while sucking at others: programming is very vast.

I don't know much about LISP, and have not data to believe (or not believe) the OP claim, but he is not alone in claiming that. For example, P. Norvig has also described how he was surprised that people could be as productive in C++ as in LISP when he arrived at google (I think it was in coders at work ? He made a slightly differente claim concerning the unimportance of language on HN as well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815).

Tiomaidh• 15 years ago

I like and agree with the article, but:

    an attempt was made to port part of that code (the
    planner) from Lisp to C++. After a year that effort
    had to be abandoned because the planner team just
    couldn't make it work.

I'm sure they'd struggle just as much if the planner was written in assembly, and not because assembly is a far more elegant language...

gloob• 15 years ago

Given that assembly is simpler than C++ both syntactically and semantically, a reasonable argument could be made that it is a more elegant language.

baudehlo3• 15 years ago

It's worth noting that he says (in the other article he links to): "In fact, in a number of cases I saw people whip things up in Perl in a couple of hours that would have taken me days or weeks to do in Lisp.".

So therefore Perl > Lisp > everything? (I'm kidding for the humour impaired)

What he gained from using Lisp was not worrying about memory management, and built-in data structures that made life easy. These days you can get that with a lot of different languages (and I would argue that Java is not one of those languages), languages that also perform as well as Lisp.

So what's my conclusion? That I think there are both - genius programmers who can code well and quickly in just about any language, and also languages that let you build things a lot faster than traditional languages.

ora600• 15 years ago

My guess is that you didn't seriously learn functional programming in any language.

It is not just about memory management and data structures. It is about functions as first class objects, no side effects, lazy evaluation, closure, monads. The fact that you can basically write a compiler in an hour as a first year student (that was exercise 3 in my course).

I'm not a programmer, I'm a DBA. The code I write is mostly short and ugly scripts in Perl and Bash. I can do very little Java and almost no other language. The one and only time I used Lisp was in my first programming course in the university. Incidentally, it was also the one and only time I enjoyed programming.

baudehlo3• 15 years ago

That would be a bad guess. For a start, Lisp is not a functional language. It just has some functional features. It has side effects.

I learned FP using Haskell, which is a pure functional language.

But I still stand by what I said. I code faster in Perl than I do in Haskell due to the availability of libraries. The "pure FP" features may make some things theoretically cleaner, but they don't honestly make things that much easier. Having access to FP features (map, grep, reduce, closures in particular) is significant, but access to built in data structures (hashes in particular) make life so much easier than C or C++ or Java.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

A better response:

stop linking to John Cook.

Every John Cook blog entry I have ever read turns out, upon inspection, to be an almost-content free restatement of an accepted consensus -- motherhood statements at best.

Whereas Jeff Atwood at least gives credit to the books he reads and summarises, Cook merely regurgitates unsourced factoids and leavens with a few unimpressive anecdotes.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

And yet, I never cease to be amazed at how many people need to be reminded of many of these accepted truisms.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

Which can be more effectively done by referring people to the original sources rather than rehashing some folk lore.

ShardPhoenix• 15 years ago

It seems that the main thing this guy is really saying is that Lisp is easier to program in than C++. I don't think that that's controversial around here. What is controversial is whether Lisp has a significant advantage over Python, Ruby, etc. Heck, he didn't even actually point out any advantage of Lisp over Java.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

I started seriously focusing on learning Lisp perhaps a year ago. My exposure to Perl had brought me to the point where I understood the idea of functions as first class in their own right.

Lisp rolled forward my mind into new places of understanding how to program. It was like having lights flicked on all over the place. I've been able to conceptualize post-Lisp in ways I did not before.

Perhaps Haskell would have done similar things. I can't say. But Lisp definitely did, and I believe that given the project (and a sufficient lack of having to interface into weird libraries), I could do more in a given slot of time in Lisp than I could with other languages.

Xurinos• 15 years ago

Yeah, Lisp is a really good mind-bender. If you picked up some good experience with CLOS, I recommend using the Moose packages in your perl work. Moose adds to Lisp's default CLOS with lazy attributes, roles, and a functioning type system.

SML, OCaml, and/or Haskell will show you a new way of looking at types (and secondarily, expose you to unification on a level that is a little deeper than destructuring-bind). If your background is in perl and then some Lisp experimentation, I recommend checking these others out in order to fill in this other nice piece in the equation. Finally, once you have convinced yourself that type systems are the hotness, it will be good to expose yourself to Erlang, specifically with regard to error handling and the role of supervisors for process restarts.

Response to John Cook's "Myth of the Lisp Genius"

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