Why we hate Lisp

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWeHateLisp

by laex • 11 years ago

33 62 11 years ago

c2.com

spacehome• 11 years ago

I'm slightly unclear why this website exists.

teraflop• 11 years ago

In case you're not joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

ExpiredLink• 11 years ago

As expected, a page for Lisp fanboys.

PeterMrltyHitch• 11 years ago

Do you ever comment more than a sentence or two? You are recognisable as the archetypical "low-effort" contributor.

coldtea• 11 years ago

Well, considering that yours is a throwaway account, he's at least reconginsable!

Marazan• 11 years ago

SmugLispWeenies is why we hate Lisp. People who, when writing Lisp tutorials, spend a condescendingly large time telling the reader that they are going to have their mind blown by the concept of first class functions. In the space year 2015 people are still doing this.

Also they have apparently never heard of Forth either.

DonHopkins• 11 years ago

Or PostScript, which combines the best of Lisp and Forth.

ICWiener• 11 years ago

I can build strawmen too:

- SmugCeeWeenie: I am so fast, look (oops, core dumped)

- SmugGoWeenie: abstractions are so nasty we should get rid of functions, so that everyhting is laid out clearly. Hopefully, I have copy/paste.

- SmugAdaWeenie: Functions are not procedures and records cannot store objects. Real engineers do not "prototype" code.

- SmugHaskellWeenie: Yeah, it compiles! Job done.

In the space year 2015 people are still doing this.

About first class functions? citation needed.

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

- SmugHaskellWeenie: cabal sandbox init, cabal install this, cabal install that, write code, add ghc pragma, wtf! add ghc pragma, wtf! add ghc pragma ... Yeah, it compiles! Job done. Almost, time to get rid of the warnings. add ghc pragma, and another, and one from the top Carol and ... yeah, it compiles with no warnings.

AKrumbach• 11 years ago

Yes, you still find articles praising first class functions in "space year 2015" because those websites were written from an Earth year 1997 perspective. Yes, maybe with Java, Python, and Ruby all having first class, anonymous functions -- making that feature well-known -- it is less mind blowing. That doesn't mean that Lisp (by which I mostly mean Common Lisp) doesn't still have potentially "mind blowing" things to teach.

Consider error handling. I would say that coming from any language where this is limited to the "try...catch" paradigm, seeing the separation and possibility provided by restarts is absolutely a mind blowing experience. (The stack doesn't unwind during the error handler search? Huh?)

Another "enlightenment" moment can come with understanding the way Lisp uses macros. No, I don't mean understanding writing macros, I mean looking at the language itself and seeing standard language features like "loop" or even CLOS being implemented using just macros. The idea of extending your language with entirely new abstractions, using just a few lines of code rather than some compiler update, should be mind-blowing. (Just the idea that "I have access to the full range of tools the language implementer used" can enlighten how to approach certain problems!)

Yes, exposure to Forth can also do all of this... but personally, I mentally filed Lisp and Forth together from the start. They both seem to be approaching the same peak "optimum" in code expressiveness (brevity / power), but from opposite sides of the mountain.

willvarfar3• 11 years ago

Python:

    sum(range(1,11))

I think this more explanatory than the Lisp. Perhaps that's just me.

jokoon3• 11 years ago

Yes, this article shows several different ways to do one same thing, you can't really expect programmers to remembers all this syntax.

from https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ :

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

I don't know if common lisp is an "easier" lisp, but I sure would like to have a watered down version of lisp so I can learn its paradigms. I don't even know if that's what haskell is.

willvarfar3• 11 years ago

I picked Python as its the language I think most easy to write and read. Concise enough without being write-only.

dzpower• 11 years ago

Racket (a Scheme descendant) might be a good fit. It has teaching languages, which are simplified, and a nice IDE (DrRacket), and books (HTDP/2e (free online), Realm of Racket, etc.)

Close match to the Python above:

(apply + (range 1 11))

Someone• 11 years ago

Common lisp = committee lisp; it's not "easier". It standardized lisp by including about every feature that any of a set of competing Lisp's had. For example, the 'format' function can write numbers in roman digits, spell out numbers, and capitalize words (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/a-few-format-recipes.html)

Beginners probably are better of using scheme or racket.

calibraxis• 11 years ago

Ok, if you have `sum` defined: (sum (range 1 11))

If we refuse to normalize the languages by defining `sum`, then it’s an API battle... And Clojure/Clojurescript has easy access to Java and Javascript. (Plus if we count Clojure on .NET...)

agumonkey11• 11 years ago

where is

   times(range(1,11)) ?

---

   (apply #'* (-range 1 11))

python is weirdly halfway on 'math oriented' abstractions.

falcolas3• 11 years ago

Just not included in to the standard library (it doesn't really have a common use case), but certainly implementable, and without loops to boot!

    >>> def times(input):
    ...     return reduce(lambda x, y: x*y, input, 1)
    ...
    >>> times(range(1,11))
    3628800

TheLoneWolfling3• 11 years ago

    from functools import reduce
    from operators import mul
    def times(data):
	return reduce(mul, data)

kedean• 11 years ago

When in doubt, the answer is 'because Guido said so'. Benefits and downsides of having a BDFL on a language.

brudgers2• 11 years ago

How did 11 come into the problem?

Aren't the integers the domain over which we are operating?

How is the comma obvious from the problem statement?

If I can assume a person knows a particular language, the J version is perfectly clear.

  +/ 1+ i.10

espadrine• 11 years ago

Or Perl6:

  [+] 1 ... 10

TheLoneWolfling3• 11 years ago

Pythonic range(a,b) is [a...b[ over the integers(in the interval sense.)

But yes, I acknowledge that every programming language requires a certain amount of knowledge about generalities, Python being no exception.

And I really should sit down at some point and learn an APL variant.

millstone• 11 years ago

Unfortunately a Russian spy stole the last meg of a LISP program for controlling our nuclear defense systems. Fortunately, it was all right-parenthesis.

simonh• 11 years ago

Thats a nice variation of a joke about German. "I normally skip to the back of a novel to find out what happens at the end, but in German that doesn't work because the last few pages are just full of all the verbs".

emersonrsantos• 11 years ago

Reddit is proof that lisp is really powerful. Paul Graham originally wrote reddit, in lisp, on the back of a napkin while he was waiting for a coffee. it was so powerful that it had to be rewritten in python just so that ordinary computers could understand it. Because it was written in lisp it was almost no effort to rewrite the entire thing, and the rewrite was completed in-between two processor cycles. Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp, by an earlier version of himself, also written in lisp, by an earlier version of lisp. It's lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down.

(from http://www.secretgeek.net/lisp_truth)

agumonkey11• 11 years ago

MIT went from scheme to python. I heard an old lisp based recursive class went to python too (people want numpy and other libs, too much pressure).

Maybe the next wave will have some sml/haskell/idris.

brudgers2• 11 years ago

MIT restructured its curriculum to be more hands on. The new curriculum included a module programming robots. Python provided an interface and is a good general purpose language. The fact that robots entered the reasoning indicates how different the new curriculum is from SICP.

th0waway2• 11 years ago

The one thing that I take away from all of this is that the people complaining just don't 'get it'. I don't know whether it's a personal failing of the individuals involved or something about lisp that is orthogonal to most people's thought processes, but the page reads more like (to me) sour grapes than a reasoned discourse on why lisp sucks. Compare that to the article posted yesterday about CLASP (https://drmeister.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/announcing-clasp/) - a brilliant piece of engineering that the creator said was just not doable in other languages, and you have a huge cognitive dissonance. But then, ymmv.

th0waway2• 11 years ago

Ooops, an old link to CLASP. Here's a newer link:

https://drmeister.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/i-gave-a-talk-on-...

Why we hate Lisp

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