Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)

http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp

by d0mine • 18 years ago

27 31 18 years ago

randomhacks.net

raju• 18 years ago

For the admins - Dup -

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98438

d0mine• 18 years ago

Thanks. I think 352 days is an excusable time for the repost.

zitterbewegung4• 18 years ago

No offense but I think a great deal of hacker news fans have seen this one way or the other. I remember there was response to this called lisp is an acceptable lisp. If you want lisp and are using ruby why not just use lisp? If you want ruby but use lisp just use ruby. It doesn't matter which programming language you express your ideas in. It only matters if you actually get cracking and implement your ideas. Pointless saber rattling about programming languages is quaint and dandy if you aren't actually programming. To quote feynmann "If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!"

gruseom4• 18 years ago

This is so wrong in so many ways, but I think the ur-mistake, the one that leads to all the others, is writing an article like this in the first place. You like Ruby? You like Ruby. Use it! Why write a whole article trying to justify how you feel? It's as if the author is trying to give himself (and others) permission not to use Lisp.

qqq2• 18 years ago

Suppose you're right. He is trying to give himself permission to not use lisp, so he feels better. Then writing this helps him use ruby (as you advise). so it's good that he wrote it. (but no need for you to read it).

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Very clever, except that you miss the point, which is that he has to concoct a bunch of bogus arguments in the process, and those are not so good.

pg• 18 years ago

He is saying something. Something false, I believe, but not meaningless. There is a certain style of programming that was once only possible in Lisp. The author is claiming that you can program that way in Ruby, or close enough.

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Oh, I don't think it's meaningless, just that the arguments are bad, and seem to have been invented in order to justify something that doesn't really need justifying.

Now I suppose someone is going to ask me what arguments are bad. Two examples: 1. "The most common use of LISP macros is to avoid typing lambda quite so much" - obviously false; 2. Using Lisp to model a Ruby example of "mini-language" demonstrates Lisp's power, not Ruby's.

ii2• 18 years ago

It works both ways. Don't you like Ruby? You don't like Ruby. Don't read articles about Ruby!

I for one may use Ruby as a scripting language for my next project, I want to see more articles like this.

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Don't read articles about Ruby!

I usually don't! This is an article about Ruby and "LISP". I read articles about Lisp. This one is mistaken, I think, mostly because the author hasn't used Lisp to do much, but writes about it anyway.

But I really don't mean to carp about the article. Ruby makes him happy, that's great.

strlen• 18 years ago

I think the definite false part is 'ruby is a[n acceptable] Lisp' - which is false. One could have a language with a ruby like syntax and co-routines and be a Lisp.

One could probably argue that Perl6 is a Lisp with CFGs a first order language primitive (which is in essence what macros allow), c.f. Greenspun's Tenth.

olavk• 18 years ago

I don't see how Ruby could be called a Lisp. To me, the fundamental concept of Lisp is that the basic data structure is the cons-pair, and that both code and data can be represented and manipulated as graphs of cons-pairs.

The blog is arguing that Ruby is an acceptable alternative to Lisp, which may be true. But that doesn't make Ruby a Lisp.

erso• 18 years ago

The crux of the post seems to be that because Ruby has lambdas, it is an acceptable alternative.

In my experience, being that I'm learning Haskell and coming from a Ruby background, merely having lambdas doesn't qualify for functional status.

Maascamp• 18 years ago

Well said. The latest version of PHP is going to have lambdas, and I'm quite certain that it's not a Lisp.

thisisnotmyname• 18 years ago

He's not arguing that ruby is a Lisp, just that it gives most of the power of Lisp in a syntax closer to what most programmers are familiar with.

Jebdm• 18 years ago

You're right, but he shouldn't have titled it "Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp".

neeson• 18 years ago

Interestingly enough, one of Clojure's selling points is that the basic data structure is not the cons-pair (rather the implementation details of storage are abstracted). It is clearly a lisp, however.

tptacek2• 18 years ago

Stating the obvious: there's a difference between "provides much of the value of in practice" and "being". The same logic says that Esperanto is an acceptable English.

jhancock• 18 years ago

I'm still trying to decide if ruby is an acceptable OOPL. Sure, the language itself is, but the way people use it? not always so.

So far as the idea "Ruby is an acceptable Lisp"? This is as wrong as the idea "Time is Money".

Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)

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