The Next Lisp: Back to the Future

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/nextlisp(1).htm

by parenthesis • 17 years ago

36 13 17 years ago

lambdassociates.org

parenthesis• 17 years ago

But it seems Mark Tarver (the author) is ending his work on Qi:

http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/5927...

rw• 17 years ago

Do I hate that the only implementation of Qi is not fully FOSS? Yes.

Do I love this essay? Yes.

bayareaguy3• 17 years ago

I find it amusing that although Mr. Tarver himself seems to admit his ideas on the future of Lisp could be better presented by omitting his strawman arguments supposedly debunking the "ecomonics" of open source efforts, he nonetheless can't seem to restrain himself from including them.

My suggestion to Mr. Tarver: if you want me to take your language ideas seriously, save your "opinionating" until after your technical ideas are widely adopted. As much as I'd like to try out a promising language like Qi, an ideological rant against open source won't help convince me or anyone else it's a good idea.

mjgoins2• 17 years ago

And to make his rant painful on top of unconvincing, he confuses free-as-in-speech with gratis.

paracelsus2• 17 years ago

No. He starts talking about FOSS - MIT and BSD stuff. This is nearly in every case free economically. And the GPL stuff is almost always free economically too. In practice if you give people complete freedom over sources you really have to give them the same freedom you have to change and distribute. So by undercutting price tends aymptotically to zero. People know that and so they make it free from the outset. They make their money from hand-holding.

paracelsus2• 17 years ago

Nonsense. This is tantamount to saying that unless a person's ideas are widely accepted or he's rich he should shut up if his ideas are not popular. I don't think he cares much whether you use Qi or not.

He's linked the two essays because he sees there is a connection between funding and development and he's right.

bayareaguy3• 17 years ago

I suspect you too must have strong feelings on the subject of open source economics since you've clearly misunderstood and mischaracterized my point: airing these views doesn't help promote Qi so he shouldn't link them all together.

I'm not an expert on lisp or functional languages so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the first two pages where he presents the design tradeoffs of Qi. Then on the next page instead of learning more about Qi, I find myself in the middle of an argument where his word choice confuses the distinction between free/unsupported open source and free/unencumbered open source. WTF? Didn't he just tell us on the previous page one of his strategies for Qi development was "3. Infiltrate don't confront".

And then I get to learn how he's decided to resign his job and become a wandering Taoist.

anc20202• 17 years ago

Makes some good points, but calling Python a sugaring on Lisp is a bit weird, especially since it misses 3 of his 5 philosophies of Lisp.

miked• 17 years ago

>> 1. Recursion as the primary mean of expressing procedure calling.

Does anyone know what that statement means?

The author misses the real essence of Lisp, which is that:

1) a single data structure, the heterogeneous list, can be used to express everything in the language, including the program itself.

2) the linear nature of lists makes it easy to recurse on them, thereby enabling significant use of recursion as a control structure, thereby simplifying the reasoning process about the code.

3) the simplicity and pervasiveness of the list structure makes it easy to write macros in the language, thereby increasing the range of abstractions that the language can express.

4) bindings are dynamic, increasing language flexibility and making the use of a REPL even more valuable.

anc20202• 17 years ago

I think his point 1 was your point 2.

The Next Lisp: Back to the Future

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