Lisphp: A Lisp Dialect Written in PHP

I just wrote a toy lisp interpreter in C++. It's kind of amazing how easy it is to interpret lisp. Hard part is writing the GC and tail call optimization. Not trying to diminish the post at all, I just think Lisp is a cool language :)

janogonzalez• 13 years ago

no link to the repo :(

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

A genuine question which looks like hate but isn't: why are people still innovating on PHP? I can understand why it may still be in use, but why nurture the ecosystem?

The only people I know that care for PHP enough to be into this kind of thing are people who have never written anything but PHP, and that's a small number of people...and the number of those competent enough to write a LISP in PHP is precisely nil. Only my experiences, sure, but I'm sure I'm not that off the mark.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

the number of those competent enough to write a LISP in PHP is precisely nil.

There are many people competent enough to write a lisp in PHP, but most are working for companies that still work with PHP (of which there are many, including some pretty high-profile companies)

krapp4• 13 years ago

Why not?

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

Personally? Because I'm not a sadist?

bananashake2• 13 years ago

It's a fine language with various pros and cons versus ruby/perl/python/lisp/clojure/java/c/go/javascript etc.

I can imagine many handy reasons to have a lisp interpreter in PHP.

Also, for your information, I've written code in many languages. I've written thousands of lines in lisp. Typically, if I'm aggravated at a project, it's because of the project itself, and not the language. It's odd to me when people find the language to be so significant for a language that is fairly mature.

ivanhoe• 13 years ago

This might also sound like hate (and it isn't, I'm really curious), but how much work (and what kind) did you actually do in php, before you realized that it's not worthy and should be killed off?

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

Webapps, unsurprisingly. Enough to know that I was using the wrong tool when I burst out of my little bubble and opened my eyes. I've since written/played in more languages and problem domains than I can be arsed to type, and not once I have I said to myself "You know what I need for this job? PHP."

Edit: I totally lied, there was an occasion where I had that thought. A friend of a friend wanted the year in her otherwise static site's copyright notice to auto-update. So I emailed her a snippet to paste and told her to change the file extension.

citricsquid2• 13 years ago

PHP has huge potential and it has grown in a lot of positive ways in recent years thanks to the nurtured ecosystem. Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are really evolving the language into something that can compete with things like Rails. Sure there's still a huge mess of legacy code out there and there are a lot of poor quality applications that a generic PHP dev may encounter, but if you make an effort to write good code and use only good tools you can definitely avoid the PHP pain that a lot of people remember from <2010.

Here are some books that will introduce you to Laravel (http://laravel.com/), it's nothing like the PHP of <2010. https://leanpub.com/codebright https://leanpub.com/laravel https://leanpub.com/implementinglaravel https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

Ok, I can believe that's true. I'm definitely talking pre-2010 here.

But you speak of competing and avoiding pain - my point is why not just use something that was decent from the get-go? I still don't get it.

Ruby/Clojure/Python/Javascript/Scala guys will wax lyrical about why they're awesome - ever seen Rich Hickey talk? That man has an ideology and a fiery passion for it. I never see anything remotely like this come out of the PHP world, just vague pseudo-defensive statements.

jtreminio2• 13 years ago

You realize PHP powers well over 70% of websites around the world?

Why wouldn't people use it, and create new things in it?

Sorry you had horrible experiences with it, but seriously, get off your high horse.

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

Don't make it personal - I'm trying not to insult PHP here, and certainly not you.

I'm not on a high horse, I just don't get it! Fine, sometimes we have to work with things we don't like. I get that - am I going to do anything beyond what's necessary and start writing libraries for it? Not on your nelly...

I can't be that wrong because for all PHP's ubiquity, it still doesn't have a ubiquitous package manager (that works) for sharing these creations.

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

You're responding to a troll. Probably best to not to give him the satisfaction.

bencoder• 13 years ago

Have a look at the linked repository, under src/ and see if it looks anything like what your expectations of PHP are.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

The reason is simple: PHP is getting better. It took a long time, but people owe it to others and themselves to help PHP thrive because it can only get better with the help of others. Frameworks like Laravel are somewhat responsible for the resurgence in PHP development, it's becoming an exciting language to use again, the quirks and issues the language had are slowly but surely being fixed in versions post 5.3 that's for sure.

You have to remember that no other language has really been able to beat PHP in terms of ease of use and setup. Every shared host in the world has PHP installed. There's no server to start, no scripts to run, you just upload your files to the server and they work. Django/Rails and all of those other languages don't just run on most shared hosts. PHP is easy and that's part of its appeal and the reason why it won't be dying any time soon.

Every language has quirks, not just PHP. If you want to talk languages that were too, once horrible and in some ways still are, look no further than Javascript. That didn't stop it becoming the most widely used scripting language on the web.

afandian• 13 years ago

There are lots and lots of people who are using JavaScript under duress because we have no real choice. I for one don't like it, but I get on with it.

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

I agree with you on the JS thing, and it's interesting to note from this thread that PHP may actually be on the up this time.

HN_Master_Race• 13 years ago

https://speakerdeck.com/akuzemchak/the-state-of-php-2013

https://packagist.org/

http://getcomposer.org/

https://github.com/symfony/symfony

https://github.com/laravel/laravel

clienthunter10• 13 years ago

That presentation was interesting, definitely some stuff I don't recognise.

aaronem• 13 years ago

I like that presentation! It's engagingly shameless about not being able to say anything better for today's PHP than that it's roughly where Perl was ten years ago.

teh_klev• 13 years ago

The problem is this. Most bods either hammering out PHP or deploying popular PHP apps such as WordPress, Magento or Drupal are deploying to shared hosters.

Until such time the Rails/DJango/Flask/Sinatra/Node/etc folks come up with a compelling shared hosting story for the likes of 1&1, Fasthosts, GoDaddy etc then PHP will continue to be hugely popular. Like it or not PHP has virtually no friction, technically or cost-wise, when building and deploying your first apps. Add to that we now have some nice dev tools such as PHP Storm and VS.PHP which grease the wheels of PHP somewhat more.

Yes I know there's the Herokus of the world out there, but your average mort agency developer has never heard of these things, or possibly may not have the skills.

Trust me, I work for a webhoster, and despite asking myself the same questions, I do understand firsthand why PHP is hugely popular, despite my own misgivings about the language.

drakaal• 13 years ago

Someone took my favorite language theoretically, (meaning I love everything about it but I don't get to use it much) and combined it with my least favorite language theoretically (meaning a language I am forced to use a lot, so I'm really good at it but feel dirty every time I use it).

Should I feel good or bad?

krapp4• 13 years ago

I don't know how you should feel but I find it hilarious.

bananashake2• 13 years ago

Now you can put lisp code in your PHP. Be sure to test this out with your coworkers or you might get tar'ed and gzip'ed.

kalleboo• 13 years ago

It's so easy to troll HN - just mention PHP

Vektorweg• 13 years ago

classic http://xkcd.com/297/

justinhj• 13 years ago

this was posted 3 years ago as well. It's interesting to compare the comments. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Lisphp

Lisphp: A Lisp Dialect Written in PHP

Related Stories