5 ms·

There's something very off about working with a lisp and not being able to inject stateful inline expressions for prototyping. In other lisps you find the fluid

There's something very off about working with a lisp and not being able to inject stateful inline expressions for prototyping. In other lisps you find the fluid abstraction/computational nature of sexps holding up very nicely while in Clojure you find yourself having to rewrite larger portions of functions just to test or fix something. A lot of my turnoffs from Clojure is that it takes away the whole "geometrical logic glue" aspect of sexps and leaves behind what feels like a neutered stack-based language for the JVM in lisp's clothing.

hga 11y ago
Hmmmm; I haven't worked with Clojure enough, and that after a decade break from programming and several from serious LISP programming, but ... while I like it, I don't find it very tasteful in many ways, including that very sort of way. It's a language I like to program in, but not one I think I'll ever fall in love with like mainline LISP and then Scheme. While I very much like the first class syntax for arrays, maps, and sets, there's a tremendous advantage to having one main or even exclusive built in composite data type, e.g. I hear that a strength of Lua, which I gather has been very successful. LISP's DNA, as well as Scheme's I'm pretty sure, was established in the days when that was lists.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  "While I very much like the first class syntax for arrays, maps, and sets" Don't lisp advocates usually say it has no syntax.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    It has whatever syntax you create for it. ;-)
  - 59nadir 11y ago
    Clojure explicitly makes '()' and '[]' different, as well as a few other delimiters. '(1 2 3) is a list like in Lisp tradition, but [1 2 3] is a vector. That is the syntax that the parent is talking about.
    - WildUtah 11y ago
      Yes, specifically [:whatever] is syntactic sugar for (vector :whatever) and {:what :ever} is syntactic sugar for {array-map :what :ever}. CL has the #() syntactic sugar for the first and the #'acons syntactic sugar for the second. So, in fact, Clojure is no more unLISPy than CL in the most quoted respect. (Quote from CLtL: Many people have suggested that brackets be used to notate vectors, as [a b c] instead of #(a b c). This notation would be shorter, perhaps more readable, and certainly in accord with cultural conventions in other parts of computer science and mathematics. However, to preserve the usefulness of the user-definable macro-character feature of the function read, it is necessary to leave some characters to the user for this purpose. Experience in MacLisp has shown that users, especially implementors of languages for use in artificial intelligence research, often want to define special kinds of brackets. Therefore Common Lisp avoids using brackets and braces for any syntactic purpose.)
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Clojure tried to push the homoiconicity as a first class rule, so it felt logical to have a literal for built-in types. But at the same time I .. how to say that, don't want syntax. First lisps had the minimum of it: sexp, symbol. jmc lisp stopped there, they then added numbers and strings for ergonomic sanity[1], and it feels the right balance, the proximity of metalevel and language, the adt/dsl feel since everything will be an sexp based abstraction (SICP ate my mind?). So clojure tried principled consistency, I like the logic of it, but not the result. Erik Meijer and Brett Victor claim it's a good thing to do. Find a concept and go all the way down with it. [1] it would be fun to be denotational even for these. (arithmetic-sum (number two one three) (number six six six)), yes it would be.
  - hga 11y ago
    Exactly. But I think people like us have to accept that many other people hate a sea of parens to the point they violently reject LISPs (e.g. http://ancell-ent.com/images/parens.png http://ancell-ent.com/images/parens.png) ; my question WRT to Clojure is, how many of them have come on board in part due to adding to and in some cases changing the (nearly) pure s-expression syntax we love? If a fair number have, I'm willing to accept it for the benefit of "Lisp", for Clojure has created the greatest movement in "Lisp" since the Lisp Machine and microprocessor heyday of the '80s. Ah, I might add that for me, the REPL style of programming is my #1 feature. One of my greatest programming feats what with CodeCenter/ObjectCenter, an interpretive environment for C/C++, where I ported a scanner driver and rewrote the engine for monster Kodak document imaging scanners in 3 weeks. The very first time I hooked up one of these 600 pound, bigger than a washing machine scanners and hit the "Go" button it worked all the way through to writing files. Well, until I ran out of file descriptors, forgot a close() ^_^. But I found being able to do that rather impressive, granted, I'd been working on the lower level SCSI code for a couple of years with optical drives and scanners.
    - Macha 11y ago
      That image fails at making its point however. Even without the brackets, who considers "cond = 1 ag ad recurse carry augend addend 1" a beautiful line of code?
grandalf 11y ago
> inject stateful inline expressions for prototyping would you give an example of this? Just curious as someone who has spent more time in clojure than in lisp.
thom 11y ago
I'm ashamed to say I don't know what either of your points means. Your Clojure experience on GitHub seems nontrivial so I'd love to hear more!

hga 11y ago

Hmmmm; I haven't worked with Clojure enough, and that after a decade break from programming and several from serious LISP programming, but ... while I like it, I don't find it very tasteful in many ways, including that very sort of way. It's a language I like to program in, but not one I think I'll ever fall in love with like mainline LISP and then Scheme. While I very much like the first class syntax for arrays, maps, and sets, there's a tremendous advantage to having one main or even exclusive built in composite data type, e.g. I hear that a strength of Lua, which I gather has been very successful. LISP's DNA, as well as Scheme's I'm pretty sure, was established in the days when that was lists.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
"While I very much like the first class syntax for arrays, maps, and sets" Don't lisp advocates usually say it has no syntax.
- yarrel 11y ago
  It has whatever syntax you create for it. ;-)
- 59nadir 11y ago
  Clojure explicitly makes '()' and '[]' different, as well as a few other delimiters. '(1 2 3) is a list like in Lisp tradition, but [1 2 3] is a vector. That is the syntax that the parent is talking about.
  - WildUtah 11y ago
    Yes, specifically [:whatever] is syntactic sugar for (vector :whatever) and {:what :ever} is syntactic sugar for {array-map :what :ever}. CL has the #() syntactic sugar for the first and the #'acons syntactic sugar for the second. So, in fact, Clojure is no more unLISPy than CL in the most quoted respect. (Quote from CLtL: Many people have suggested that brackets be used to notate vectors, as [a b c] instead of #(a b c). This notation would be shorter, perhaps more readable, and certainly in accord with cultural conventions in other parts of computer science and mathematics. However, to preserve the usefulness of the user-definable macro-character feature of the function read, it is necessary to leave some characters to the user for this purpose. Experience in MacLisp has shown that users, especially implementors of languages for use in artificial intelligence research, often want to define special kinds of brackets. Therefore Common Lisp avoids using brackets and braces for any syntactic purpose.)
agumonkey 11y ago
Clojure tried to push the homoiconicity as a first class rule, so it felt logical to have a literal for built-in types. But at the same time I .. how to say that, don't want syntax. First lisps had the minimum of it: sexp, symbol. jmc lisp stopped there, they then added numbers and strings for ergonomic sanity[1], and it feels the right balance, the proximity of metalevel and language, the adt/dsl feel since everything will be an sexp based abstraction (SICP ate my mind?). So clojure tried principled consistency, I like the logic of it, but not the result. Erik Meijer and Brett Victor claim it's a good thing to do. Find a concept and go all the way down with it. [1] it would be fun to be denotational even for these. (arithmetic-sum (number two one three) (number six six six)), yes it would be.
- hga 11y ago
  Exactly. But I think people like us have to accept that many other people hate a sea of parens to the point they violently reject LISPs (e.g. http://ancell-ent.com/images/parens.png http://ancell-ent.com/images/parens.png) ; my question WRT to Clojure is, how many of them have come on board in part due to adding to and in some cases changing the (nearly) pure s-expression syntax we love? If a fair number have, I'm willing to accept it for the benefit of "Lisp", for Clojure has created the greatest movement in "Lisp" since the Lisp Machine and microprocessor heyday of the '80s. Ah, I might add that for me, the REPL style of programming is my #1 feature. One of my greatest programming feats what with CodeCenter/ObjectCenter, an interpretive environment for C/C++, where I ported a scanner driver and rewrote the engine for monster Kodak document imaging scanners in 3 weeks. The very first time I hooked up one of these 600 pound, bigger than a washing machine scanners and hit the "Go" button it worked all the way through to writing files. Well, until I ran out of file descriptors, forgot a close() ^_^. But I found being able to do that rather impressive, granted, I'd been working on the lower level SCSI code for a couple of years with optical drives and scanners.
  - Macha 11y ago
    That image fails at making its point however. Even without the brackets, who considers "cond = 1 ag ad recurse carry augend addend 1" a beautiful line of code?

grandalf 11y ago

> inject stateful inline expressions for prototyping would you give an example of this? Just curious as someone who has spent more time in clojure than in lisp.

thom 11y ago

I'm ashamed to say I don't know what either of your points means. Your Clojure experience on GitHub seems nontrivial so I'd love to hear more!