I'm turning into a Lisp snob

http://briancarper.net/blog/im-turning-into-a-lisp-snob

by bgray • 17 years ago

70 92 17 years ago

kunley4• 17 years ago

OTOH the Go authors made it clear that it's intended to replace C for the basic system programs & libs. I think that's step in the right direction.

I started to earn money using Erlang & Clojure, so looks like I'm not only fan of new exciting high-level langs but also quite an adopter of them in the so-called real world. Still there are some uses when a VM of your Chosen One language brings an unacceptable overhead. Imagine your daily work using vi, grep, find as they were compiled into jars and each running via JVM. Nightmare with that 2 seconds delay of starting each little proggy, isn't it? (Have you ever used the original Amazon's EC2 commandline tools written in Java? You'd know what I mean).

Of course it could be solved by some kind of injecting of program to be run to some VM already running, but that's not an established practice of working with basic programs in your system. At some level fast binaries are needed.

Personally I think it's a pity that some language of SML family didn't get to the mainsteam for such system programming. Haskell is fun and people write things like text editors and window managers in it; but is still perceived as too academic for real tasks which isn't completely true.

omouse• 17 years ago

I think that's step in the right direction.

Maybe for UNIX junkies. Other people would like to use languages that don't suck and operating systems that aren't retarded.

gloob2• 17 years ago

Experimental evidence suggests that people want to use Visual Basic and Windows, actually. Although the language stats may have changed since the last time I looked at them, I'm reasonably certain at least Windows is still on top. Make of that what you will.

Edit: For what it's worth, I have some sympathy for Microsoft's position. I don't doubt that if they could just break away from backward compatibility they could make something far less kludgy than what they have; unfortunately, if they did break away from it, they'd lose an awful lot of money. Alas.

kunley4• 17 years ago

You are missing the point. Replace vi & grep with your most used dlls.

barrkel5• 17 years ago

> "Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms"

Programming language obscurity is also usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms. Church numerals?

The happy place is somewhere in the middle, where there's enough language such that you don't have to build it out of other pieces - and this also helps with performance, static analysis, tooling, debugging and lots of other areas - but there isn't so much that you end up with lots of methods to do the same thing, in similar but incompatible ways.

shawndumas• 17 years ago

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. --Antoine de Saint Exupéry

barrkel5• 17 years ago

My point is that with programming language abstractions, you can in fact remove things without hurting the theoretical power of the language, but actually harming the practical power of the language.

You do have to leave things in that you could take away.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

And yet Antoine is famous for book-length works, not poetry, and certainly not minimalist poetry.

Don't take the lesson too literally. You can, in fact, take too much away. How much you need to put in depends on your artistic goals and, of course, on your audience.

gwern• 17 years ago

Having few special forms does not rule out syntax or having useful functions. Look at Scheme, for example. (Or Haskell, most of which syntax desugars into functions you could write yourself, like records or do-notation or list comprehensions.)

sedachv• 17 years ago

One observation to be made is that Common Lisp has 25 special forms (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...). That's quite a lot. But none of them are redundant or superfluous.

barrkel5• 17 years ago

I am very certain that almost all of them could be removed without reducing the theoretical power of Common Lisp. At worst, successive rewrites of the program could reduce it to using a different set of simpler forms.

miloshh6• 17 years ago

"I could show these poor imperative programmers how their problems could be solved much easier in Lisp if I wanted to." That to me (as an outsider) seems to be the main message of these Lisp blogs. But at some point, nobody will believe you could do it, unless you actually do.

jerf3• 17 years ago

You seem to be complaining that... Lisp doesn't exist? You seem to be saying his complaints are of the from "A hypothetical language I have in my head can do that better", but the complaint is of the form "This existing language does that all and better."

Given that the only other "problem" in the post is a Hello World post, surely you aren't complaining that the author failed to include a "Hello World" lisp program? Well, here you go:

    (print "Hello World")

I do not understand what you're saying at all.

(Also, I'm not a lisper. In fact I'm increasingly of the opinion that it represents a wrong direction for the future of programming languages. So this is not a "pro-Lisp bias" thing.)

jstraszheim• 17 years ago

Just curious, what do you think is the right direction?

pavelludiq2• 17 years ago

I'm curious, i rarely see any REAL[1] criticism of lisp, just the old "ughh, my eyes, all those parenthesis, aaa" type of nonsense. Why do you think its a wrong direction?

[1] Im not talking about implementations, obviously, Common lisp, scheme and clojure have their problems, im talking about the general idea of lisp.

miloshh6• 17 years ago

Well, Lisp sure does exist, and has been used to solve real world problems. But those were predominatly in applications where performance, parallelism, graphics, large matrix computations and GUIs do not matter. If you want to pick on the imperative languages (i.e. Pascal/Fortran/C/C++), you better show you can do what they can do.

mmphosis• 17 years ago

I tried:

    (print "Hello World")

The result I expected was:

    Hello World

The result I got was:

    "Hello World"

In the language we are using, the "Hello World" program is simply:

    Hello World

but, this is my anti-Lisp bias thing.

maelstrom2• 17 years ago

Yes, if Lisp is so powerful, where are all the super programs written in it? I'm only aware of EMACs and maybe at one point Autocad? And I guess PG wrote a couple webapps with it....

cschep• 17 years ago

I think the standard argument would be that the average programmers are using average languages, so popularity is a horrible measuring stick for powerful languages.

briancooley• 17 years ago

Well, there's the stuff from ITA Software that powers Orbitz. Flightcaster is using Clojure. Impact Solutions in Houston uses Lisp for real time analysis of oil rig data.

There're a lot more.

mahmud4• 17 years ago

That's a logical fallacy. Something can be both great and unknown to you. Usually, you seek information about things you know you need/want, and can afford. If a topic does not interest you, you will forever remain oblivious to it, except maybe for some tangential news about it that reach you by accident.

It's naive to think that just because you're a programmer you know everything there is to know about the software industry. You don't. You know about a small fraction of the mainstream development tools, and even those, at a superficial level. For example, can you name the top software products for running local elections? how about automating a chemistry research lab? packages for oil exploration? vacation property management? real-time spoken Chinese processing? computational archeology? artist talent management? threat modeling for distributed corporate networks?

See? :-)

"Social" programmers, the guys you see in chat rooms and "community" websites are all mostly generalists, and typically work in well defined roles as grunt programmers. Nothing fancy, website here, a database there, a GUI or two, click, generate, zip, distribute, and call it a day type work. Don't let this closed echo-system define your perception of "the software industry".

mjgoins2• 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com is written in a new lisp dialect.

briancarper2• 17 years ago

I don't know about super-programs, but I use Clojure at work (doing things no one else would ever care about) and I use it at home to solve fun problems. I previously did the same things in PHP and Perl and Ruby and Python and such, and the Clojure versions are easier to write and maintain, easier to use, less code, more fun etc. Same for Common Lisp, generally.

I wouldn't extrapolate beyond that. I don't know what languages are good for writing super-programs since I never wrote one. Super-programs are a small subset of all programs.

lispm11• 17 years ago

Here is an example:

http://www.cyc.com/cyc/technology/whatiscyc

A large knowledge-based system with several hundred thousand concepts (classes) and millions of assertions (facts and rules).

Under development since 1984.

intellectronica• 17 years ago

If you're truly passionate about hacking it would be hard to avoid becoming a LISP snob at some point in your development. But if you're pragmatic, you'd be able to transfer what you've learned from LISP to other environments, that may be better suitable for today's technological landscape. Is Google Go the way to go? Only time will tell. But there's little you can usefully do with LISP these days (unless the scope of the program you're working on is so restricted that you really only need the language purely).

barrkel5• 17 years ago

If you get into compilers and language design, all languages turn into more formalized versions of Lisp mixed with some libraries and macros. Lisp in many ways is little more than a serialization format for a syntax tree, with a DSL for converting that tree into an executable program.

That's both its biggest advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage in that it can be stretched and flexed to cover any problem domain, by rigging up a language suited to the domain. On the other hand, the fact that it's so flexible means there's less common points of reference for composition in the large. Learning a language for a domain is usually more work than learning a library that uses familiar idioms, even if it is more flexible in the long term. If that domain isn't your bread and butter, a library suits you better.

It comes down to an economic argument, I believe. Some level of centralization is necessary to overcome the transaction costs of fitting lots of little languages together, which each have their own ideas about how things should work. It helps hugely in tooling, debugging, analysis, etc. Syntactic transformation via macros from a high-level language to a lower level isn't enough to create a practical modern language in the large. You need more.

As to the practical applicability of Lisp, I think you can get most of what you need with something like Clojure.

kmcgivney• 17 years ago

Nice troll. Isn't Hacker News written in lisp?

EDIT: HN is written in Arc. You're saying that there's "little you can usefully do with LISP" on a site which was written in lisp.

forensic• 17 years ago

Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.

andybak• 17 years ago

I'm waiting for a Lisp dialect with significant white space. I think I've turned into an anti-brackets-of-any-kind snob.

cema• 17 years ago

Lisp programmers already tend to use the indentation the way adopted by Python. Add more rules for indentation and newlining, and voila: all or almost all parentheses become superfluous.

(But you need to really like white space!)

gloob2• 17 years ago

Brackets make macros easy, because they make the abstract syntax tree blatant. Make it less blatant, and macros will become much more difficult to write. Given the options of i) macros are easy to write, and ii) Python-style indentation rules enforced by the interpreter/compiler, I'll take (i).

c00p3r4• 17 years ago

Those guys, who designed it were not amateur. The main goal is easiness to code for average offshore programmer (hi, Java). Just name it 'C 2.0'.

mjgoins2• 17 years ago

Are you slamming the people of the island state of Java, or the programming language, or both?

c00p3r4• 17 years ago

I'm telling you that commercially successful hi-tech things in general, and programming languages in particular, should be easy to use for average prople. Java and especially PHP (which is a total mess which was never designed) are the proof of concept. Note that both of them are using C-like syntax.

The biggest prof is, of course, the mobile phones market. Usability and simplicity (along with simple visual effects) sell. And interface practices and some widgets were adopted on the web.

And yes, Java (and Windows) was designed to use low-skilled labor. There is nothing wrong with it.

tom_b• 17 years ago

Snob or not, what increasingly pulls me to languages are the highly productive DSLs that seem to fall out of them. For example, I need to deliver a few lightweight web apps/services - and I stumble across Sinatra on Ruby (with a little Sequel thrown in mixed with the oci8 oracle gem), which seems to do all I need. My little ruby code snippets look just like that - snippets that are short and expressive of the what I'm trying to do.

Lisp seems to be the "godfather" of these things and I'm more and more interested in what makes me productive, without being surrounded by a team of enterprise programmers and all the boilerplate that seems to fall out of other languages.

I make my living hacking SQL. What I'm really looking for there is the ability to create a lambda on the fly for custom grouping (eg implementing a business rule dynamically). I've worked on at least three big enterprise projects where I could have eliminated thousands, if not tens of thousands of LOC with a feature like that. Maybe I should punt and roll with a Prolog engine in the Lisp of choice. Who knows.

I really enjoy the articles and comments on these topics here on HN. Keep 'em coming.

johnbender• 17 years ago

"Sigh. (Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms.)"

I tend to agree with this, and I'm not a lisp fanatic.

alrex021• 17 years ago

IMHO, he is not a snob. Realist would be a more apropriate term.

Just my 2c.

-lisp guy

caffeine• 17 years ago

Go just strikes me as profoundly boring.

"Uh, we do lots of C. Yeah, and lots of Python. Dude. Let's make a language that's like, uh ... C and Python! Yes! Awesome."

In a world where the only thing harder than Haskell is Google's interview questions, you'd think they would've come up with something more original.

justinhj• 17 years ago

"Ugh, look at all that syntax."

As a common lisp programmer it's sad to see somebody do to another language what people do to CL. One superficial glance at the syntax and write it off, without further criticism.

"Lisp has a lot of brackets, LOL"

briancarper2• 17 years ago

After living with a nice s-exp language, C-like syntax seems like it brings a lot of problems with very few benefits. However I wouldn't dismiss a language based only on the syntax.

wglb• 17 years ago

I am (now) a lisp programmer and find myself boring many people to tears about it. But perhaps I am first a language guy, and like to see new solutions to problems. None give me the satisfaction that Lisp has (smalltalk was close, however). But I like to see new well-designed languages and how well, or not, they address the engineering challenges.

For example, turbo pascal was written during the time that I was writing a pascal compiler. The Pascal standard was truly a harsh mistress, and turbo pascal made a lot of very useful engineering choices to make a fast, very useful compiler in a small environment. Anders went on to do C#, which itself was a good engineering feat.

I watch with interest Clojure and the ecocsystem that it plugs into and it has a REPL.

But it is a pragmatic fact of life that C is a very large force in the day-to-day world, along with a tool used by serious hackers (c.f. Coders At Work).

Python is very nicely designed and gets you to a higher level of programming with ease.

So I was curious when Go came along, as a language development observer, to see what were they coming up with.

It is clearly a language that has had a lot of thought put into it and it seems to be something that will challenge C on its own turf ultimately. Faster than Python, and possibly ultimately approaching C in speed, it has some useful new ideas. In particular, how it does goroutines and channels is quite refreshing. It addresses the admonition that "threads won't work if they are just libraries" with new language constructs.

So criticism of language ought to be tempered by some experience with the language. Having done enough of them, it seems that I often don't have a full appreciation for a language until I have done something significant in that language. So I feel comfortable offering severe criticism of languages like RPG-III and Fortran II and Altair Basic and Bliss-36.

I am probably to the point of being a lisp snob by now, but do appreciate the finer points of other languages.

I think Go is a step in the right direction for the problem that it wants to solve.

morphir• 17 years ago

how can you say that C is challenged by Go? Go is built with C. This is true with python as well - in being a C abstraction. C is well suited for the UNIX-like programming, where you create efficient system libraries. With as little abstraction as possible I might add.

fuentesjr• 17 years ago

It seems you (as well as several other people) can only imagine a future with Haskell or Lisp syntax as if anything else is inferior. I find that to be foolish and immature.

Go was specifically designed to be a systems language, period. Lisp was never designed as so, and perhaps that is why its hardly used as a systems language today. Personally, I like Lisp, Haskell, and Python but I also know C is a great systems language even though its not perfect and its a bit passed its prime. Thus Go seems to be a good progression from the C/C++ family (I never really saw Java being a systems language but that's my opinion).

Anyway, I agree I think you're becoming a bit of a lisp snob. It might suit you to be a bit more open minded and objective. Even if you don't fully understand the design of Go, you should be able to understand that it was designed by people who have credible experience and skill in designing languages and systems. And sorry to spoil things for you, but the last thing I can imagine is Clojure being the next systems language.

Your post essentially is a brief comparison of a selection of fruits without much substance.

Lastly, here's a piece of advice:

"That's why I reserve the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem."

ThinkWriteMute• 17 years ago

GO is only marginally better than C, and that's not exactly saying a lot.

Modula-3? Now there was a good language :D

I'm turning into a Lisp snob

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