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One of my colleagues (a Paris Politechnique guy, so very much a mathematical purist) was recently going on and on about the beauty of lisp, and how much better

One of my colleagues (a Paris Politechnique guy, so very much a mathematical purist) was recently going on and on about the beauty of lisp, and how much better it was than C (on a formal level, of course). I think Go sits on the opposite end of the spectrum. It's a hacker's language, not a mathematician's language. It's ugly and very useful.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
" It's a hacker's language, not a mathematician's language. It's ugly and very useful." Lmao. That's exactly what hackers said about LISP. That people can often emulate a language or even paradigm (eg OOP) within the original language using macro's shows it. Strange enough, LISP can modify itself to do whatever modern languages are doing with similar productivity. It doesn't work vice versa. On top of it, the LISP compilers make pretty fast code for such a flexible language and past engineers even made dedicated hardware for it. That's why, although far from perfect, LISP is still the ultimate, hackers' language.
- omginternets 11y ago
  The language was a bit hyperbolic, but the point was rather that you shouldn't expect mathematical purity from Go. Lisp is a great language. This wasn't meant to be a jab at lisp.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Oh, yeah, I'd never put Go into any mathematical category. It's more about practical purity and simplicity like the languages that inspired it. My gripe with go was that it was a clean-slate, modern language that didn't adopt any of the awesome things PL community invented since the 80's. Julia seems to be the best example of a clean-slate language that tries to combine all the best features and attributes of various languages with good effect. Also beats Go and many other languages on various benchmarks despite dynamic typing. I'd like to see some application-server or RDBMS type of benchmarks, though, as Julia was designed for the mathematical stuff. Might not perform as well but should still be good. http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/
- deleted 11y ago
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nickpsecurity 11y ago

" It's a hacker's language, not a mathematician's language. It's ugly and very useful." Lmao. That's exactly what hackers said about LISP. That people can often emulate a language or even paradigm (eg OOP) within the original language using macro's shows it. Strange enough, LISP can modify itself to do whatever modern languages are doing with similar productivity. It doesn't work vice versa. On top of it, the LISP compilers make pretty fast code for such a flexible language and past engineers even made dedicated hardware for it. That's why, although far from perfect, LISP is still the ultimate, hackers' language.

omginternets 11y ago
The language was a bit hyperbolic, but the point was rather that you shouldn't expect mathematical purity from Go. Lisp is a great language. This wasn't meant to be a jab at lisp.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Oh, yeah, I'd never put Go into any mathematical category. It's more about practical purity and simplicity like the languages that inspired it. My gripe with go was that it was a clean-slate, modern language that didn't adopt any of the awesome things PL community invented since the 80's. Julia seems to be the best example of a clean-slate language that tries to combine all the best features and attributes of various languages with good effect. Also beats Go and many other languages on various benchmarks despite dynamic typing. I'd like to see some application-server or RDBMS type of benchmarks, though, as Julia was designed for the mathematical stuff. Might not perform as well but should still be good. http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]