Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000) [pdf]

http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf

by wtbob • 12 years ago

83 55 12 years ago

wtbob3• 12 years ago

Now that the dominant languages seem to be dynamic languages like Python, Ruby & JavaScript, I wonder if Lisp's edge in development speed is as pronounced; OTOH, I wonder if it has an increased edge in stability and/or security.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

It seems that python development speed means well rounded libraries. And IIRC lisp is still not on par with that (quicklisp users feel free to correct me). Other than that I still think that linguistically, lisps still have an edge (and a sharp one).

mackwic2• 12 years ago

But Ruby is an acceptable Lisp[0], and has also a lot of libraries. ;)

So, how will Lisp compete ?

Maybe if we look at it pragmatically, the solution is not in the performance nor in the time to develop, but in the ease of maintaining the software in the long term. A field where Lisp is not particularly brilliant.

[0] http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta...

eudox2• 12 years ago

quicklisp users feel free to correct me

Common Lisp certainly doesn't have as many libraries as Python or Ruby, but let's not exaggerate. The ecosystem is broad and deep enough for the average programmer -- me, here -- to be perfectly productive.

mackwic2• 12 years ago

There is always the last bias: lisp programmers, by their strong academical background, tend to be more educated CS-wise than JS, Ruby, or Python programmers, which enable them to a better understanding of a CS problem. It's almost tautological.

You can't just take 20 programmers and give them a problem to solve, that's not how surveys works.

alkonaut• 12 years ago

The dominant languages are still c-family strictly typed imperative languages (see e.g Tiobe). The up & coming langs are those with even more powerful type systems such as F#.

vorg2• 12 years ago

The Tiobe Index front page used to run a monthly historical comparison of statically typed languages against dynamic ones, but removed it about 6 months ago. There was a clear reversal in the trend away from dynamically typed languages 5 to 10 years back. I see dynamic languages as the 2000's version of the 1990's visual programming fad. Only one or two of those visual programming products (Visual Basic and maybe Delphi) survived, and the same will probably happen with dynamic languages: I'm picking Python and Javascript will be the only ones around in another decade.

RichardFord• 12 years ago

Python and Ruby aren't dominant against C#, Java, and C++. JavaScript is in its own category since you kind of have to use it.

Thaxll• 12 years ago

I would say that people are moving away from Python / Ruby and going back to Java, JVM is very powerful nowdays.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

dominant languages seem to be dynamic languages like Python, Ruby & JavaScript

Where?!?

JavaScript is king for those that need to target the browser, that is for sure.

Now outside the browser? There are lot of languages to choose from.

Python and Ruby are surely not the first to reach if one needs performance.

abecedarius• 12 years ago

I was a Scheme participant in this study, and nowadays I default to Python.

eudox2• 12 years ago

My experience with Common Lisp, Python and JavaScript, is that Common Lisp (More through intrinsic properties, rather than a specific choice of tools), provides a better development environment.

vorg2• 12 years ago

For the first time this month the top 5 languages on Tiobe add up to over 50% -- last month it was just under 50%. And those top five are the 5 "C+ languages", i.e...

    C (plus is implied)
    C++
    Java (3rd to rise, with syntax based off C++)
    C# (4 pluses joined together to make a sharp sign)
    Objective C (5th to rise, tho around for longer)

Whereas all the "dynamic" languages in the top 20 (i.e. Basic, PHP, Python, Perl, JavaScript, VB.NET, VB, Ruby) make up only 18% in total.

scarmig• 12 years ago

VB.NET is no more dynamic than either Java or C#. (Less so than C#, if anything: it doesn't support dynamic variables.)

zak_mc_kracken3• 12 years ago

Now that the dominant languages seem to be dynamic languages like Python, Ruby & JavaScript,

That's incorrect. Regardless of the metric (TIOBE, job boards, StackOverflow, ...), you will see that the top five languages are 90% statically typed (usually Java, C, C++, C#).

anubiann00b• 12 years ago

The run time seems to be outdated... Hasn't the JVM been updated and optimized since 2000?

wtbob3• 12 years ago

Yup. I'd really like to see the same comparison done today.

ivanche• 12 years ago

Ditto. If JVM is good enough for, say, Twitter, it's sure that performance of Java programs got better and that "Run time" and "Final image size" from Figure 1 in OP pdf would look different. OTOH I'm not in the Lisp land but I guess there was probably some improvement there too.

ElectronCharge• 12 years ago

Yes, a much more recent reference point is the Google benchmark featuring C++, Java, Scala and Go.

http://readwrite.com/2011/06/06/cpp-go-java-scala-performanc...

I'd love to see a few more languages included, Scheme and D being two. Scala had an impressive performance there, creaming Go in particular!

(Wow, it's amazing that paper is already three years old - time flies!)

snoopybbt• 12 years ago

That thing is fucking old.

The JVM has been improving a lot since then.

In order for that content to be taken seriously, the tests should be re-run with modern runtimes for both C/C++, Java and Lisp.

rjsw• 12 years ago

Has the JVM got a smaller memory footprint since 2000 ? Lisp runtimes have not got bigger.

jerven• 12 years ago

Standard JVM, slightly smaller, much faster. This is comparing to Java 1.2 before JIT/Hotspot and a decade of performance work. (Also I doubt anyone had 7.7 years of experience with Java in 2000, so that would be general)

If we consider JavaCard or Java ME a java dialect then yes, it has gotten a lot smaller! I think neither of these where available in 2000.

Running Java also does not need a JVM. There are AOT compilers for JAVA. Like Lisp there are a lot of different implementations with lots of differing trade offs.

In any case a very flawed comparison, like all programming languages comparison of this kind as it is so hard/expensive to do it correct.

But an interesting read anyway.

I think of languages as equivalent (they are all turing complete right) so something buildable in one must be buildable in the other. The question is what tradeoffs do the languages make for the humans in the loop.

Lisp and Java make different tradeoffs there, and C makes yet another set of tradeoffs. And which languages we use is more often dependant on historical accidents than technical excellence (like most human languages) see JS as an example.

I believe dynamic languages are better for small teams and short project life times. I believe automatic memory management by default languages are better for the vast majority of projects than manual memory management options. I think a written language like Traditional Chinese (Java) is better for running an empire than one like Latin (Lisp). But a more modern idea like Hangul (Clojure?) might do even better.

In the end to get the best CPU performance one needs to know the CPU and architecture as well as an ability to think in bits. And like in human language one can write poetry in all of them, its just a bit more difficult than the office memo's we tend to write and read in our jobs ;)

cscurmudgeon• 12 years ago

The lisp landscape has also been improving. The point is that false claims were made by the suits to peddle Java.

lisper3• 12 years ago

Just to put this paper in an appropriate historical context, I wrote it back when I was trying to convince NASA that flying Lisp on a spacecraft would not be a completely insane thing to do. The Powers That Be had already mostly accepted that it would be OK to fly Java, but they thought Lisp was too big and slow. This study and paper were designed specifically to address those concerns.

swartkrans2• 12 years ago

Do you still work for NASA, and did your paper succeed?

e40• 12 years ago

No and no.

adwf3• 12 years ago

Yet to this day, I still find people claiming that Lisp is an interpreted language and that the garbage collector introduces disastrous pauses in runtime. As if it was still the same Lisp people were using back in the 1980's.

hga2• 12 years ago

The 1980's state of the art was a lot better, depending on how long a pause you could afford for incremental GC (fractions of a second, OK for humans, but not a variety of applications. OK for piloting bulldozers, as one company did.)

Interpreted only ... that's a narrow, 4 year window, the first was developed in 1962.

Probably the key thing in this is that most any good programmer could hack out a Lisp implementation in a week or two. Making one preform as well as contemporary languages, strangely enough, took a similar amount of effort, and most Lisps back then didn't.

adwf3• 12 years ago

Well I was born in '84 so it's all history to me ;) I've only ever known compiled, high performing Lisps with unnoticable GC. So it's weird when I still hear people trotting out the old "bloated, interpreted, slow" line.

I sometimes think that the AI winter really took computing in a weird turn, not just Lisp, but computing in general. It feels like we stopped trying to make computers do all the work for us and decided that humans should be doing the work for the computer. So we ended up heading down the path of manual memory management in the C style languages, verbose constrained programming in Java and static typing instead of the easier dynamic. Whilst I agree that at one point, hardware performance was a serious consideration and we needed to squeeze everything we could out of computers - that is no longer the case. We're overwhelmed by hardware performance in most cases. Perhaps that's why we're seeing a resurgence in Lispy languages nowadays?

melling• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate that languages can't gain much traction in the mainstream. Rust, Haskell, Julia, Go, Clojure, Scheme... I remember the fight that it took before Python and Ruby were accepted. There's the big catch-22, of course, in order to obtain critical mass.

Maybe if we all adopted a language for our weekend projects, we'd contribute enough back through blogging and StackOverFlow questions that we'll add enough knowledge, etc to the net, that it'll become increasingly easier for the next person.

Btw, I'm using Go for my weekend web site project: http://thespanishsite.com

swartkrans2• 12 years ago

I'd say Go is becoming mainstream pretty quickly. I think Clojure isn't far away and Rust is showing big promise. I doubt based on probably under-informed personal observation that Haskell, Scheme or Julia will ever become widely adopted.

akurilin• 12 years ago

The thing with niche languages such as Haskell is that not everybody has to use them, but we ideally would get to enough critical mass that the ecosystem is sustainable, new and better tools are continuously being developed, and it's pretty beginner friendly. Clojure is probably at that stage right about now, Haskell doesn't quite feel that way, but it's getting better (more docs, guides, books, services like Stackage etc)

Basically it's very nice when a language gets enough traction that the lack of users is no longer a concern for its long term prospects.

peterashford2• 12 years ago

From my point of view, these languages simply don't offer enough value to pay the cost of change.

zak_mc_kracken3• 12 years ago

Even for 2000, this paper is hilariously biased, starting with the observation that Lisp wins over Java in every single respect. If I order an evaluation paper and the paper comes back with 100% for choice B and 0% for choice A, I'm going to disregard it completely because the author is obviously too biased.

One of the strengths that Java has over Lisp is that it's statically typed. At the time, the direction of the industry wasn't too clear cut but this is clearly the trend today.

Another example of the bias is that the benchmarks compare development times (and Lisp wins, surprise surprise) but not maintenance time, which is admittedly harder to measure but a big liability that dynamically typed languages have.

bachmeier• 12 years ago

"One of the strengths that Java has over Lisp is that it's statically typed."

Common Lisp has optional static typing. Unlike Java, you have the choice, depending on what you're doing.

xenophonf• 12 years ago

Here's a good discussion of static typing in Common Lisp:

http://www.lispforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=191

TL;DR is that many CL implementations will check types at compile time, but for appropriate speed and safety settings, they will also generate code that checks types at runtime, too.

lisper3• 12 years ago

Common Lisp has optional static typing

That depends on what you mean. CL declarations are promises to the compiler. They permit the compiler to make optimizations but does not require it to signal compile-time errors. Specific implementations may give you compile-time errors, but in general you can't count on it the way you can in Java.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

One of the strengths that Java has over Lisp is that it's statically typed.

With the caveat that Java's type system can be subverted and isn't expressive enough to catch any more than the most trivial kinds of errors a type system can catch.

zak_mc_kracken3• 12 years ago

That's a straw man, we're comparing Java to Lisp, not to another statically typed language.

Because Java is statically typed, it catches a lot more errors at compile time than Lisp can.

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

Most type systems (including Haskell's) can be subverted. Java does catch many common errors, typically of the form "I refaxtored, now this function takes 4 args instead of 3" or "this function returns an X now".

The latter sort are, in my experience, the most common form of type error and catching g them is awesome.

peterashford2• 12 years ago

"Expressive" tends towards "complex". I would argue that Java's type system is pretty simple which is a good thing - a pragmatic choice. You sound like you're making "perfect" the enemy of "good"

wedesoft• 12 years ago

Then you are biased towards papers which don't offer a clear choice. Sorry, couldn't resist ;)

Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000) [pdf]

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