International Lisp Conference 2014 Summary

http://www.cipht.net/2014/08/19/ilc2014.html

by pietrofmaggi • 12 years ago

75 19 12 years ago

sramsay2• 12 years ago

"CL went through a spike of interest in the mid-2000s; where did those people go . . ."

I don't know about others, but I was part of that spike and I went . . . far away from Common Lisp.

Learning Lisp absolutely blew my mind. I felt like every page of Peter Siebel's Practical Common Lisp was some new kind of glorious revelation. I was going to write everything in Common Lisp.

I did write some fairly serious things in CL, but in the end, it came down to what felt like a broken, barely documented, half-assed ecosystem for doing most of the things that ordinary working programmers want to do.

I realize that sounds harsh and unfair (though I'm hardly the first person to put it in those terms), but the problem is relative. It's not a total disaster as such, but if you're used to the ecosystems of languages like Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript -- almost anything else (including, in recent years, Haskell) -- you'll probably find yourself frustrated with CL. I did, anyway.

So what did I do? I abandoned CL and took my knowledge over to languages like JavaScript (cum Underscore) and Clojure.

The OP ends that quote above by asking "What can we learn from that?" I don't know. I don't know how a group of brilliant programmers working in one of the most brilliant languages of all time end up turning enthusiastic newbs into people who feel frustrated and disappointed. But I'll say it: It for damn sure ain't the language or the skills of the people who work with it.

chaoky• 12 years ago

Maybe give CL another try? Since the mid-2000's the ecosystem has definitely improved exponentially. (ala Quicklisp, Quickdocs, and related portable libraries) Threading has a de-facto implementation as well now.

ced2• 12 years ago

Also part of that group - Paul Graham's essays drove me to Lisp. I am very happy with what I've learned over ~5 years of near-exclusive CL usage. I agree - while CL-the-language is amazing, CL-the-ecosystem just doesn't have any momentum. It's spread too thin.

I think I'll be putting my chips on Julia from now on. It should be a near-ideal language for data science and AI research. I like that it's focused on one thing (numerical computations), so it should avoid the lack of focus that plagued most Lisps.

scottlocklin2• 12 years ago

I also got into lisp (Lush lisp) because of Graham, and still consider it a glimpse of the promised land. The thing is, if you haven't screwed around in an APL language, you don't realize what you're missing. For numerics, the array part of the language is much more important than the rest of the thing. When I read the J sources, I recognized what Yann and Leon were trying to do in Lush, and the combination with a decent lisp repl was gold. Now all the array parts are in Torch7/Lua, along with threading, the bleeding edge of Deep Learning research, better C++ support and CUDA. Lua ain't pretty like lisp, but these are practical men, and it has everything one needs. Julia: no thanks.

mlitchard• 12 years ago

I was amazed by lisp, also encouraged by Paul Graham's work. When I came to questions of packaging for use by end-users, I didn't like what I saw. Explorations into my options led me to Haskell. Since then I've started asking more interesting questions and haven't looked back.

tokenrove• 12 years ago

OP here. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

I am quite bad about maintaining conversations on HN, so I would appreciate it if you would email me if you have any thoughts on those questions -- why did you leave CL, what could have been done to improve the community or ecosystem?

I am not promising to fix these things, but I would like to give it another try.

eudox2• 12 years ago

The reason I have stuck with Common Lisp, rather than bailed to Clojure or something else, is that the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem.

Regarding the ecosystem, Common Lisp has improved a lot over the recent years. We have Clack (Equiv. of Python's WSGI/Ruby's Rack), a bunch of web frameworks, an ORM, a small set of web-related tools built around those. It's certainly nowhere near the size of the ecosystems of Ruby and Python, but I think it's acceptable given the size of the community.

I do, however, think there has to be a movement like Fare's "Lisp library consolidation"[0] to, if not expand, improve the existing libraries: Build Github Project Pages, Sphinx documentation, a better-looking wiki. Just porting old READMEs to Markdown would be an improvement.

[0] http://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html

wukix2• 12 years ago

the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem

This is why I created https://wukix.com/mocl. CL has a ton of merits. It's unfortunate that people pass over CL because it's "old" or whatever (a worthless criterion if there ever was one). The language is great, and with a little house cleaning, CL can seriously kick ass.

mapcar• 12 years ago

Wow, I haven't seen the licensing model to use a language in a while. Many researchers are migrating away from MATLAB for that reason, and new projects are often not initiated in MATLAB unless it incorporates legacy code. How's this business model holding up?

wtbob2• 12 years ago

That looks pretty cool. Did y'all reimplement Common Lisp, of take advantage of one of the BSD-licences ones?

Is your focus primarily on OSX/iOS, or equally on Android?

sramsay2• 12 years ago

I'm emboldened by comments like these, and I don't mean to be harsh or dismissive. Maybe time to give it another try. But I'd like some acknowledgement of the problems, which I think is what the OP was after.

eudox2• 12 years ago

I do acknowledge (Or try to) that Common Lisp has plenty of problems. But aside from some design flaws, I think the majority of these problems are social, which in a way is a good thing: Fundamental characteristics of a language cannot be changed, but presentation and impression can and should be improved. What is needed is the right people making the right appeals to the community.

malvosenior• 12 years ago

I was looking up some info on hash tables in Scheme the other day and came across this insightful HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531079

I imagine the same applies to CL.

I personally use and love Clojure, but wish it compiled to native code.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

I personally use and love Clojure, but wish it compiled to native code.

It is a matter of implementation, not the language.

So you can:

- use a JVM with AOT compilation like Aonix and RoboVM among many others

- use a bytecode AOT compiler like Excelsior JET

- join the Clojure to C or Clojure to Scheme compiler projects

- write your own compiler

wtbob2• 12 years ago

In Common Lisp:

    (setf h (make-hash-table))
    (setf (gethash 'foo h) "hi") ;; -> "hi"
    (gethash 'foo h) ;; -> "hi"
    (gethash 'bar h "bye") ;; -> "bye"

That's not too bad. Not quite as perfect as bracket-based dereferencing, but I can live with it.

International Lisp Conference 2014 Summary

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