Lisp as an Alternative to Java

by llambda • 15 years ago

114 37 15 years ago

jdludlow• 15 years ago

the directions said to code as you would professionally

I'm curious to know if anyone wrote test cases for their code. I didn't see any here, but maybe they are in a separate file or weren't allowed to be submitted to the study.

dextorious4• 15 years ago

Test cases were not that fashionable back in the day.

Surprisingly, people still got work done.

mjb• 15 years ago

> Test cases were not that fashionable back in the day. Surprisingly, people still got work done.

Reinforced concrete did not exist back in the day. Surprisingly, some people still got work done.

It's tempting to be dismissive of modern development practices (TDD, for example) using the argument that a lot of great software was written before it existed. If the icons of the past could write Unix without TDD, why do we need it to build a CRUD app? This is an extremely poor argument against improving development practices.

People were getting building done before reinforced concrete, doing particle physics before synchrotrons, and designing mechanical devices before CAD. Since we have had these things, however, each of these fields has advanced significantly due to their use. It would certainly be possible to design the complex solid forms of something like an iPad without CAD, but it would be much more difficult and expensive. It's the same way with development practices. Modern development approaches, in many cases, significantly reduce the cost and risk of software development.

igouy2• 15 years ago

Lest we forget -

IEEE Standard for Software Unit Testing

Approved December 11, 1986

pearle• 15 years ago

Is this an older article or something recent? A 1999 paper is referenced but the article itself does not seem to have a date.

geebee• 15 years ago

Yeah, and Java is referred to as "3-4 times slower than C++", which makes me think it's probably from the late 90s or early 00s.

That said, most of the arguments for Java around improved speed might apply to any language that runs on the JVM, though someone else might want to chime in here (I'm a little out of my depth trying to talk about how Lisp, Ruby, etc are implemented on the JVM).

dextorious4• 15 years ago

Actually, for a programming genius, those exact comments in the article seems lazy and ignorant.

tomjen33• 15 years ago

Unfortunately the JVM is optimized for Java, rather than for computer languages in general. This is a problem because you can't just say execute function 'foo' on object bar, you have to look up the type of bar to find foo and then execute it.

Clojure gets around this by having all its functions implement a standard interface, and Java 7 has sorta seen the light (still no closures, but they can kind be emulated).

JRuby just suffers.

igouy2• 15 years ago

The Internet Archive shows "Lisp as an Alternative to Java" onwards from May 31, 2000.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000531154721/http://www.norvig....

mark_l_watson2• 15 years ago

This is an old article but still relevant, especially since Clojure allows co-mingling Java and Clojure (Lisp) code. I find Clojure especially useful on my own projects because there are no problems finding developers or getting customer approval for using a very nice, but niche language.

I still like (J)Ruby a lot but the runtime performance of Clojure is better and the two languages seem, to me, to be equally "agile" - both are a pleasure to code in.

jasonjackson• 15 years ago

You've found it easy to hire people with existing Clojure experience? That surprises me, great news though.

dpritchett• 15 years ago

He is saying that he uses Clojure for personal projects because those are the projects where he doesn't have to recruit for or justify his choice of a niche language.

JoeCortopassi• 15 years ago

I'm guessing what he means is that, because Clojure can work so well with Java, he doesn't have to find people with Clojure experience to help on a Clojure project, he can just get Java people (of which there is an abundance).

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

Getting customer approval is often the hardest part. Back in 2002 I started working with Python and Zope. It was easy to hire and train people in Python and Zope (you can pick up Python in an afternoon and work from there), but it was mindbogglingly hard to convince customers the data not being in a relational database was, actually, an advantage.

aninteger• 15 years ago

It's 2012. There is an alternative to Java. It's called C#

tomjen33• 15 years ago

Yeah, but it is not really relevant in this context.

The distance between C# and Java is much, much smaller than between lisp and any member of the C family (except objective C).

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

C# and Java are very close. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers - LoC, performance and time-to-develop - were very similar to the Java ones. The article states the Lisp code is significantly smaller and development was much faster. I don't see how C# could approach Lisp even adjusting for the fact it's Peter Norvig writing it.

scarmig• 15 years ago

Well, "very close" might be an exaggeration. C# has lazy evaluation, generators, LINQ, generics, and functions as first class citizens, while Java has... none of those. Or what amounts to none of those.

Overall C# ends up being a much more expressive language. Though obviously C# and Java are closer than C# and Lisp.

bborud2• 15 years ago

I can imagine that Lisp without the shitty attitude would be great. The shitty attitude that elegance and purity is so much more important than actually being able to talk to the environment a program runs in.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

Why do you think that Lisp programs can't talk to the environment?

Also, even if you couldn't, flippantly dismissing "elegance and purity" as a "shitty attitude" is not very constructive.

rayiner• 15 years ago

Elegance and purity are the last thing Common Lisper's care about. Common Lisp is a by-committee spec, after all. If you're going to characterize the "shitty attitude" around Lisp, it's much more about the language being pragmatically well-designed. Dynamic, but not unmanageably so like Ruby. Tasteful API design unlike Java. Performance much closer to Java than to scripting languages. Etc.

lispm• 15 years ago

The original Common Lisp was more like a community work. It led to an understanding about the language in early 1983. A book about the language was then published in 1984: CLtL1.

The work on the ANSI CL standard started then in 1986 using the ANSI standardization process. An intermediate language description (not a work of ANSI) was published as CLtL2. The ANSI CL standard then still took a few years more work to finalize and publish a standard document.

jacquesm• 15 years ago

Lisp does not have an attitude.

bborud2• 15 years ago

But the Lisp community does.

discreteevent2• 15 years ago

The following are taken from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803351

----norvig 449 days ago------

Peter Norvig here. [....] In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.

----edw519 448 days ago----

[....] Someone should write a program that automatically posts this paragraph [Norvig's] at the top of every language war thread. I think they should write that program in php :-)

----poet 449 days ago-----

An approximation of some of Norvig's recent thoughts (Feb 2010): "(1) It just turned out that when Google was started, the core programmers were C++ programmers and they were very effective. Part of it is a little bit of culture. (2) Early Lisp programmers (Erann Gat) at Google actually noticed that other programmers were equally or more productive. It has more to do with the programmer; we're getting to the point where language choice is less important (as opposed to 20 years ago). (3) Lisp is optimized for a single programmer or a small group of programmers doing exploratory work... If I want to make a change in a weekend I'd rather do it in Lisp than anything else, but by the time you get up to hundreds of programers making changes are not a language problem but a social one. (4) Libraries." Paraphrased from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7k0_9k0VA#t=03m20s.

raganwald• 15 years ago

Yes, but given A = people, B = architecture, and C = language (and ignoring process for brevity’s sake), the two honking giant caveats are these:

Just because A > B > C does not mean that C does not contribute to the result and can be dismissed. C may be less important than A, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

Specifically, assuming you have a sane process for hiring people and a sane process for choosing a language (e.g. we are not talking about the gap between “I CAN HAZ CODES” programmers and Norvig, nor are we talking about the gap between Brainfuck and Lisp), the contribution of A to the result is not so many orders of magnitude greater than C that you can ignore C.

And:

A > B > C. Fine. But are these independent variables? No, we know that the language affects (for better or worse) your ability to attract and retain certain developers. So A and C are not independent. Likewise, certain architectures are just plain hell to implement with certain languages, so B and C are not independent.

Solving for the maximal result of A, B, and C does not mean choosing A first, then B, and then C. It means choosing the best combination of all three at once.

Update: Nothing I’ve said here disagrees with Norvig, caveats are warnings not to oversimplify, not suggestions the advice is incorrect. Also, http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

discreteevent2• 15 years ago

I agree entirely. Its a balance, that's why I referenced the qoute from Norvig. Not to show that language has no importance at all but that even in this very particular case the author has a broader point of view than is represented in the article. Anyway even though I don't really miss C++ I was thinking the other day of all the code that I wrote in it when I had no choice but to use it. I got a lot of work done, and it wasn't a mess either. I would say that in my case anyway I tend to think that the language matters more than it does and this (in my case again) is a source of procrastination. So Norvig's qoute is like a kick in the backside for me (focus on what matters) and that's a good thing.

hello_moto• 15 years ago

That's true, choice of language does attract certain type of developers. At one time in the past, it seemed that it was for the better goods. But lately, it isn't. Choice of language is used as a recruiting/promotion practice that may not be for the good of the business: they tend to attract people who jump between companies quickly as soon as they found another "cool" technology.

Let's be very very very honest here. Geeks like to try the latest coolest cutting edge. Don't forget to add the allure of working at the coolest hottest startup in Silicon Valley (or the "chance" to be able work, given that you mastered a specific technology) for street-cred and if they're lucky, IPO or big $$$.

How many times you see/hear/meet people switching jobs just because they don't want to be perceived as "behind the time"? (When in reality Google, Microsoft, are still moving forward with old-school technology).

Personally, I felt that there's Fire and Motion (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html) going on in the so-called "hacker/startup" community.

At the end of the day, there are some developers becoming the victim of Fire and Motion being executed by a small group of alpha-nerds that write the initial code in their preferred cutting edge technology and left the company for another cutting edge green-field software development, leaving the "legacy 2 years old code-base filled with hacks" to the next group of developers that try to catch up the boat.

OK, enough ranting. Now, can we move on from the whole programming language war conversation?

dextorious4• 15 years ago

"""Early Lisp programmers (Erann Gat) at Google actually noticed that other programmers were equally or more productive. It has more to do with the programmer;"""

The might have been mighty good Lisp programmers, but if they had to "notice" that, instead of knowing it all along, they probably have drank too much of the Lisp kool-aid.

Really, if Lisp is so productive, how come very few things of major importance have come in Lisp? Besides Emacs and/or Viaweb.

99% of stuff we use is made, well, NOT IN LISP (including variations on the Lisp theme, from Scheme to Clojure).

If something was that much more productive, wouldn't it have surfaced in, you know, actually producing things?

I understand that Lisp has a smaller developer population, but even so, if it's so much more productive, where are all the cool usable tools made in it, by some talented guys? I can mainly/only find some internal tools at that or this facility, or Lisp used for extension language.

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Lisp as an Alternative to Java

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