Where Lisp Fits

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/02/03/where-lisp-fits/

by Adrock • 12 years ago

83 111 12 years ago

adereth.github.io

Have to say by now I am tired of clicking on a Lisp titled article and having to read about Clojure. Please stop hyping Clojure. It's not LISP and its not Lisp either. We have a Lisp, it's called Common Lisp, its perfectly fine, far superior to Clojure and will prevail Clojure by decades.

To underline how awfully skiddish Clojure is from a lispers perspective, the first thing he mentions is the "thrush macro": http://clojuredocs.org/clojure_core/clojure.core/-%3E Which is needlessy to say a typical example of the skiddish culture of Clojure. The brain train goes like this: "Oh we have grown this ugly zombie breed between a ruby and a java, how to we make it look intentional? Oh that's easy just put on a little of this completely pointless macro cream to make it look hip!"

Worst: The article isn't even about Clojure. Please in the future label Clojure as what it is (an experiment in STM), and do not forget to mention that we have a great standardized language with great implementations which make the whole industry look bad. And we have that because engineers worked on it for decades.

Edit: Thank you kind power-user for going through the whole thread and downvoting every comment I made, that's the kind of cargo-cult marketing I was talking about. I think downvoting shouldn't exist, makes it unpleasant to comment on topics where you don't share the mafias opinion. Yay HN!

Adrock2• 12 years ago

OP here. I didn't realize that Clojure was a trigger word! I just included that bit at the beginning to give a little context on how I got into this topic, not to hype anything.

mrottenkolber16• 12 years ago

No problem. I just fear that people overlook the serious CL.

maaku3• 12 years ago

It's not, or at least it shouldn't be...

rolandukor2• 12 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but what are your greviances with clojure? It seems to me to be a very practical LISP.

mrottenkolber16• 12 years ago

Like I said its an experiment. CL is a great piece of work forged by decades of engineering _consensus_. Feel free to take a look at ABCL if you want to know where the man hours of clojure should have went into.

Its just like ruby, a trend that a lot of effort is wasted on, because the fundamentals are plain wrong.

jonnybgood• 12 years ago

Instead of telling us your feelings are hurt that Clojure is being called a lisp, you should explain why you think Clojure is not a lisp.

mrottenkolber16• 12 years ago

It's _a_ Lisp. It's not _the_ lisp and not a particular good one either.

McCoy_Pauley• 12 years ago

Clojure is more like scheme in that it only has a one scope environment. Common Lisp (and Lisp) are defined by having 2 scope in the environment. One scope for the functions and one scope for variables, if I remember correctly. An easy way to learn your way around lisp is to read and work through Graham's essay "Roots of Lisp": http://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html

swannodette• 12 years ago

Nothing against Common Lisp but CL is not the lisp and it never will be. CL is a lisp same as Clojure - http://www.islisp.info/faq.html. Also you seem to have no problems critiquing a language which you obviously have no significant experience with - "Clojure is an experiment in STM". Guffaw.

hga16• 12 years ago

As a historical example, mainline LISP prior to CL was dynamically scoped, something corrected in Scheme and adopted by CL a decade later, which, from my Maclisp and Lisp Machine Lisp background at the time was perhaps its biggest breaking change (very possibly not from the viewpoint of an Interlisp person).

lispm8• 12 years ago

Clojure is a new language.

Everything in Clojure had to be implemented new. There is zero compatibility and zero code sharing to/with Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Autolisp, ISLisp, Standard Lisp, Maclisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, ...

mrottenkolber16• 12 years ago

Actually I use Clojure professionally, and am very glad about it.

S4M• 12 years ago

I agree that the "thrush macro" is not such a good example to show the greatness of the Lisp family of language. IMHO it's a nice syntactic sugar but it doesn't bring something fundamentally new. Still IMHO, a more suited example of the power of the macros would be how to write a memoize macro that enables to cache the results of some function.

sdegutis2• 12 years ago

This kind of blind zealotry kills innovation.

agentultra5• 12 years ago

It's true and it happens on both sides. I've met Lisp programmers who came in by way of Clojure who openly criticize CL for its use of parentheses and its age. It's quite silly.

kjjw• 12 years ago

Are you 5?

unpleasnt_truth• 12 years ago

(You don't like to hear this, but it's your german soul crying here, more than anything else.)

gtrak3• 12 years ago

This is somewhat irrational critique, clojure was an opportunity to start fresh and graft a concurrency-focused lisp onto a pervasive runtime, not to reimplement ABCL. It fills a need.

I was always somewhat halfway interested in learning common lisp, but when clojure came along I actually got excited enough to do something about it.

You even say you're 'very happy' to be working in it, but I think 'an experiment in STM' is too reductionist and shallow to address the numerous use-cases that are improved by persistent data structures and the other features that clojure provides.

roywiggins2• 12 years ago

No mention of lambda calculus? Lisp is to Lambda Calculus as Pascal is to Turing Machines. More or less.

Oh, beaten to the punch in the article's comments. Carry on.

Adrock2• 12 years ago

OP here... here's my reply from the comments:

Yep, I'm aware of the Church-Turing thesis and the relationship between TM and the Lambda Calculus. I originally had a mention of it, but I removed it because I was really more focused on the RegEx -> CFG -> ? chain and I couldn't find anything that made that connection with the Lambda Calculus. Any sources that make that connection would be appreciated!

roywiggins2• 12 years ago

You might like Thue; it operates solely on replacement rules and is trivially an unrestricted grammar:

http://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue

UNIXgod• 12 years ago

I enjoyed the article. Your connection your looking for is with Stephen Cole Kleene who also a student of Church just like Turing.

todd82• 12 years ago

I've heard all of these arguments in support of Lisp for many years, but I'm still not convinced. Indisputably, Lisp is remarkable and holds a special place in the pantheon of programming languages. Every argument in it's favor makes sense, a lot of sense. Reading these arguments in favor of Lisp is not like reading a blog touting the benefits of Javascript where even the positive points don't really sound so positive. The arguments made for Lisp are persuasive.

Lisp is different. It's really quite unique; it has an elegant simplicity underlying its implementation and a deep connection to the foundations of computation. Think of this, Gregor Kiczales's book Art of the Metaobject Protocol was published 23 years ago! I learned to program in Lisp 40 years ago. What other languages did I use back in those days? Assembly language (IBM 360, CDC 6600, IBM 1130, etc), PL/1, Fortran, APL, COBOL. Nobody, argues today that we should be trying out PL/1 or we should give COBOL a try. (Are there any projects on Github using these languages from our hazy, distant past?) Lisp's beauty and power have kept it alive and vital all these years. But, there's something wrong with this story.

If Lisp is really so great, why hasn't it triumphed? I use Lisp all the time: my editor needs it during periodic tune ups. However, I can't think of when I've reached for it first when I've had a choice. Python is just easier to get things done in. If my programs don't run fast enough I don't think of Lisp, I think of C or C++. Haskell is where it's at as far as programming language research goes, not Lisp.

The important observation is that it's not just me. Lisp has had time to prove itself. It made it to the finals, and it deserves the lifetime achievement award. We can honor it's beauty, it's longevity, it's power, and even it's fantastic reincarnations (Clojure), but this isn't enough. If Lisp really was the language that we should be programming in, it would have demonstrated it by now.

mrottenkolber16• 12 years ago

I think it proved its superiority many times. Its just that certain people couldn't admit it to themselves. Other langs are just a great way to ignore cold hard engineering facts and give grunt-work developers a feeling of perfection.

Of course you don't need a lisp to build CRUD apps. Companies don't want to depend on highly trained engineers either. I don't care for being cheap though. I'd rather know 10% of lisp than 100% of yet another dead-end language.

AnimalMuppet3• 12 years ago

Yes! Lisp is the superior language! The only reason it doesn't dominate all others is that most programmers are too stupid to see how wonderful Lisp is!

Ahem.

You'd be somewhat more persuasive if you dropped the arrogance and stopped assuming that those who disagree with you are self-deceived fools.

bjourne• 12 years ago

I'm curious if you, and other lispers, do acknowledge the possibility of there being languages whose users are rightfully even more smug than them? You think that you are enlightened and have seen lisp being superior. Yet perhaps you have only opened the first door and there is a whole world of even more powerful and algebraic programming abstractions you aren't aware of?

dman• 12 years ago

What does triumph mean in a computing context?

Hackers by their very nature seek mastery over challenging concepts. I think haskell and lisp are similar in the sense that they have long roads to mastery. The average hacker in these languages spends many exhilirating years scaling the tower of knowledge and this journey does a great job of keeping the hacker occupied and mystified. In simpler languages like C / Javascript there is very little in the language with which to immerse yourself. The only recourse for a stirring experience is to go ahead and build something immersive.

Haskell and Lisp are great languages for thinking deep thoughts. Expecting them to dominate the computing landscape is similar to expecting an abstract algebra book for topping the New York times best sellers list.

jules3• 12 years ago

Lisp isn't even all that unique any more. Garbage collection, closures, REPL & macros are all available in other languages these days. Scala for instance has all these features.

maaku3• 12 years ago

It's still mostly unique as a fully homoiconic programming language where code is represented as a simple data structure at the heart of the language.

hga16• 12 years ago

Fashion and politics are very important.

E.g. LISP was ascendant until the '80s when it was blamed for the business failures of various overhyped expert system companies, part of that AI winter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#The_setbacks_of_the_...

Read up on e.g. the history of LISP at JPL: it's termination with extreme prejudice was basically done on a political whim.

This is not to say the Scheme and Common Lisp communities didn't get massively and almost/perhaps terminally wedged in the following periods, but that's another story. Many of us old time Lispers say look at Clojure for the likely successful future of Lisp.

And of course read our host's essay on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Jach• 12 years ago

For the lazy, this is a good write-up of Lisp's JPL history: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Since I'm posting that link for people looking into the history I might as well also recall Naughty Dog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp) using their own lisps (GOOL and GOAL) in their games until Sony acquired them... And ZIL (http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ZIL) was used by InfoCom for their text adventure games. (The ZIL manual linked on that wiki is amazing.) And of course T's interesting history... (http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html)

Finally a quote by Kent Pitman I like: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."

You're right about fashion and politics. Social issues, those are the problems a lisp really faces.

todd82• 12 years ago

I'm replying to my own comment because the other commenters have made such good points and I'm responding to several at once.

I wish that in my rather long career that I had a chance to work on a big project using Lisp. How else can one really make judgements about the suitability of a programming language. Simple programs and personal projects don't give one a feeling for the value of many important and perhaps subtle language features that have significance at a scale where we all all strive to improve our tools. So I can't speak with the authority of the other commenters, and I relish the comments of those that have had industrial level experience with Lisp (see hga’s comments).

However, I have read books on Lisp, dozens of them. I've worked in the group that implemented a commercial Lisp at Texas Instruments. I've owned a copy of the InterLisp reference manual. I've programmed in Lisp before Common Lisp existed. I used Lisp in a classes taught by Patrick Winston and used Lisp and lambda calculus to understand CLU's semantics while working on my undergrad thesis with Barbra Liskov. I took the class before SICP was a book; I’ve still got the mimeographed notes. I not a Lisp expert, but I'm not even close to the troll end of the scale either. Of course I'm familiar with Blub and Phil Grahamm’s other essays, everyone could benefit from reading these. He explains one of Lisp’s great benefits: it makes you a better programmer. I know it has done this for me; I was wrong to suggest that Lisp hasn’t triumphed (see dman’s comments).

Once upon a time I tried to introduce Lisp as an important part of our system architecture in my company, but the other engineers objected ("too many parentheses"!!). To avoid outright mutiny I developed an alternative design that didn't need a Lisp interpreter. Perhaps I should have not given in. (see mrrottenkolber’s comments).

Not being an expert on Lisp, I’ve tried to figure out how much energy to put into further developing my skills there. Should I direct companies that I run or consult for to use it? Or should I tell them to use something else? This is the dilemma that I face, and this is why these discussions interest me. As jules notes, many of Lisp’s contributions to programming languages have now made their way into the most popular languages today.

Roboprog• 12 years ago

"Too many parentheses" :-)

Oh for the damage I've seen C programs cause due to "not enough parentheses".

Not really the main point, but there is a certain amount of irony there.

arvid• 12 years ago

"Too many parentheses" is a cop out for "This language is too far out of my comfort zone." And I think that is why Lisp is not as successful as other languages.

I also think the almost mythical status of Lisp is also a hindrance. Lisp couldn't possibly live up all the hype. This leads to a backlash of common complaints ("not enough libraries", "smug lisp weenies", "bad culture", "no ide", "prefix notation is unreadable") when it does not live up to the hype or worse the user fails to grok lisp. The mythical status also leads to a higher percentage of trolls.

Back in the day, most programming was from scratch or at most trading bits of code. Lisp was great in this environment. Coding from scratch was quicker than other languages and due to its dynamic nature morphing someone else's lisp code was easy. Today most programming is patching together libraries or tools. Scripting languages are ideal for this. No one "steals" code any more, they "steal" whole libraries.

beat3• 12 years ago

As I often say, LISP is the language of the future, and it's been the language of the future since before I was born (in 1965!). It will always be the language of the future. If it hasn't become the dominant language in 50 years of computing, it probably won't happen. On the other hand, it hasn't died in 50 years of computing either. The only other language that has shown that kind of longevity is C, which came into being less than a decade after LISP.

Frankly, I think a lot of the problem is social. LISP proponents have a historical condescension that really doesn't sit well with all the programmers that they think are idiots for not using LISP. Less stick and more carrot would go a long way. Consider the thread elsewhere in this discussion that whines about how Clojure even got mentioned! Clojure is exactly the sort of carrot that will bring current programmers into the functional paradigm. Bashing it because it's not pure enough is lunacy if you ever want your language of choice to be dominant, and not merely feel smug and superior to the lazy corporate sods who use crap languages. I see these attacks and remember the attacks on Scheme long ago - same issues.

I firmly believe large social things happen for a reason other than "people are stupid". If LISP holds only a tiny corner of the programming world while some genuinely dreadful languages (PHP!) rule the roost, there's probably more to the story. It would do the LISP community some good to meditate on that for a while.

hga16• 12 years ago

"LISP proponents have a historical condescension"

I think this is a recent phenomena, which probably developed after the late '80s AI Winter et. al. crash. When Lisp was ascendant in the early '80s, the attitude, at least in the MIT community, was that everyone could and if they so desired should learn Lisp.

Bernie Greenberg, among many other things the author of Multics Emacs, which used Maclisp as one of its implementation languages and of course as its extension language, was immensely proud about MIT secretaries using it to turn keyboard macros into real extensions.

Although, he was a major evangelist at the time, author of a great intro I've been trying to find a copy of, the guy who said "Cons is an object which cares. It cares about its car and cdr", etc. etc. But he was fully supported by everyone I knew in the MIT Lisp community.

And I think Scheme escaped some of this, or at least it didn't suffer like CL did since it retained its place as a teaching language for quite some time, only falling in this century (e.g. MIT panicked after the dot com crash resulted in EECS enrollment dropping more than by half, Berkeley recently retired its SICP class when professor Brian Harvey retired, etc.) ADDED: and unless things have changed very recently, has retained its place in computer language development. Heck, while not the same thing, Javascript is basically a Scheme with a prototype-based object system and C style syntax.

Clojure as far as I can tell has escaped this, then again it's being quite successful currently and per my guess above that would help a lot.

As for the "people are stupid" thesis, our host has interesting commentary in that direction with his Blub language hypothesis: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

BTW, as I understand it, FORTRAN, the first computer language (Lisp is the 2nd oldest survivor) still is very big in number crunching.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

I think whether they knew it or not, old Lispers couldn't communicate with the world without friction. The paradigm shift was probably too large, even nowadays a lot of people will frown even though gc, closures, map/filter and other idiom have bubbled up. I felt the same the first time I saw ML.

tlarkworthy• 12 years ago

An interesting next step to Turning machines I read about recently was Kolmogorov-Uspensky machines. They allow pointers and are nearer to real machines we use. Whilst they still recognising the same languages in polynomial time as Turing machines, for some things they can compute and order of complexity class faster. Turing machines often end up traversing up and down the tape, linearising binary tree lookups for instance, whereas KU can do binary tree lookups in O(log(n)). Both machines do the lookups in P, but KU's particular P can be provably lower.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_machine

Zigurd• 12 years ago

TFA doesn't actually say where Lisp fits. I rather wish some contender for The Next Mobile OS would make a "Lisp Android" - An ART-like Lisp runtime with a zygote-like fast start for processes and copy-on-write to crunch down memory use from multiple instances of the runtime.

That's where I think Lisp would really fit. But it would take a lot of unconventional thinking about Lisp implementation and APIs.

grdvnl• 12 years ago

nitpick: Here is the link that describes why Clojure's threading macro is not really a pure thrush operator.

http://blog.fogus.me/2010/09/28/thrush-in-clojure-redux/

calroc2• 12 years ago

Backus' paper on Functional Programming might be of interest; click on: "ACM Turing Award Lecture" http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/backus_0703524.cfm

Where Lisp Fits

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