4 ms·

... Because so many languages are made in a matter of hours or days. Can we please drop the machismo? Making a language takes about a decade, with multiple peop

by tormeh 11y ago

... Because so many languages are made in a matter of hours or days. Can we please drop the machismo? Making a language takes about a decade, with multiple people involved. A prototype one without a library can be made in a matter of months, but nobody would want to use those. I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it's interpreted, but it's not that easy.

mlieberman85 11y ago
I think you misunderstood. A dialect of lisp is a fairly trivial exercise. We were able to do it in a single lecture back in college. Now that dialect had trivial and essentially useless functionality but allowed us to easily build on and create new languages, but lisp was designed to allow for these dialects to be made and to be made easily.
- tormeh 11y ago
  Did you make an interpreter in one lecture? Or did you just add a new macro to an existing language? S-expressions are tidy, tidy things, but just the underlying tech used to build a lexer, parser and interpreter takes a good while to understand, much less learn to write that quickly. Lisper just reminded me of some HN commenter who once wrote that "any idiot can build Youtube, it's making it scale that's hard", and that guy gets on my nerves. Sorry about projecting that onto lisper.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    There's tutorials to manually or automatically derive parsers for whatever you can clearly define. LISP's syntax makes this trivial. From there, you just need a few functions and tree operations for interpreting/compiling. LISP is designed for tree operations with tutorials and code for those. From there, a GC and I/O with many examples in papers and on the web with doc's plus code. Additionally, there's a ton of LISP/Scheme interpreters to draw on. Hard to imagine an easier one to interpret. Compiling isn't that difficult if you target C as it basically takes two techniques. Takes a few more to target native and you don't get that in 90 minutes like one Scheme-to-C compiler presentation. What is your counter-example in terms of mainstream languages that's easier to lex, parse, interpret, compile, or link than LISP? Or even as easy? Even Wirth's languages are more complex and difficult to compile despite being brilliantly simple.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      Oh, I do agree Lisp is the simplest. No contest there. Hm, I guess it may be because building a new language (with some interesting properties) was my master thesis and it was really unpleasant. I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        That's a fair point. It's never easy and I had that rough experience, too. I mean, I wasn't a real expert on these things so mine was a reimplementation of existing work but still hard. Curious, what was your language's interesting properties? "I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp." It might help if you see a modern example. The recent language impressing me the most with its features is Julia: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ Wondering aloud about how they pulled all that off, esp macro's, led someone here to tell me it's actually femtolisp internally: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp So, they appear to have built a simple LISP, then used it to incrementally build a compiler for a complex language. They just represent the syntax internally in a LISP form and work with it from there. Don't know much more than that but it shows the power of the concept. Better demo is the one below as it goes step-by-step in stages. One commenter (Orion63) pointed out the author was re-using the proven cheat: "build a LISP, do it all in LISP, profit." Haha. I've considered duplicating that work with different language options. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065
        tormeh 11y ago
        My language's main feature was deterministic multithreading, of the synchronous school. It also forced a certain structure: All threads started and the shared variables they can write to have to be in the same area, arguments are always named, and sequence doesn't matter (optional in Python), shared variables can only be written to by one thread, but read by all. In contrast to some other deterministic multithreading solutions, the sequence in which IO is effected is also deterministic, not only the sequence of application to shared variables. The compiler had a typechecker and compiles to C++, using GCC to do the rest. I guess I should submit it to HN sometime...
nickpsecurity 11y ago
As a personal exercise, you should compare making a LISP interpreter or compiler to Wirth's treatment on doing an imperative language sometime. The difference is a 100-200 pages of work. Plus, the LISP can self-modify during compile to add any subsequent feature. It's not machismo: it's just the design of LISP. Easy to parse, easy to modify, easy to evaluate, data as code, basic primitives that express anything else at least acceptably, and on 50's-60's hardware. Additionally, building a useful LISP (esp Scheme) is an academic exercise done all over the world that's fairly easy even for amateurs. Building a useful, non-optimizing C++ compiler with only a subset of LISP capabilities is an exercise only undertaken by masochists very dedicated to compiler design. Even a prototype is easier for LISP (a few pages of code) while a prototype of C++ or even C's semantics is much more challenging. So, the empirical evidence counters your claim in terms of completed projects, their complexity, and features received in return.
kornish 11y ago
> I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it's interpreted, but it's not that easy. As an example, here's a guide for writing a Scheme interpreter in a matter of hours: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_... It definitely doesn't take it months to walk away with a working implementation. Whether or not the language you've just written is actually useful or preferable to alternatives is a different question, and there I agree with you that communities, libraries, and language maturity can take a long time to build. Lisp's simple syntax makes it a prime target for creating new dialects (like Clojure) to experiment with semantics.

by tormeh 11y ago

mlieberman85 11y ago

I think you misunderstood. A dialect of lisp is a fairly trivial exercise. We were able to do it in a single lecture back in college. Now that dialect had trivial and essentially useless functionality but allowed us to easily build on and create new languages, but lisp was designed to allow for these dialects to be made and to be made easily.

tormeh 11y ago
Did you make an interpreter in one lecture? Or did you just add a new macro to an existing language? S-expressions are tidy, tidy things, but just the underlying tech used to build a lexer, parser and interpreter takes a good while to understand, much less learn to write that quickly. Lisper just reminded me of some HN commenter who once wrote that "any idiot can build Youtube, it's making it scale that's hard", and that guy gets on my nerves. Sorry about projecting that onto lisper.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  There's tutorials to manually or automatically derive parsers for whatever you can clearly define. LISP's syntax makes this trivial. From there, you just need a few functions and tree operations for interpreting/compiling. LISP is designed for tree operations with tutorials and code for those. From there, a GC and I/O with many examples in papers and on the web with doc's plus code. Additionally, there's a ton of LISP/Scheme interpreters to draw on. Hard to imagine an easier one to interpret. Compiling isn't that difficult if you target C as it basically takes two techniques. Takes a few more to target native and you don't get that in 90 minutes like one Scheme-to-C compiler presentation. What is your counter-example in terms of mainstream languages that's easier to lex, parse, interpret, compile, or link than LISP? Or even as easy? Even Wirth's languages are more complex and difficult to compile despite being brilliantly simple.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    Oh, I do agree Lisp is the simplest. No contest there. Hm, I guess it may be because building a new language (with some interesting properties) was my master thesis and it was really unpleasant. I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      That's a fair point. It's never easy and I had that rough experience, too. I mean, I wasn't a real expert on these things so mine was a reimplementation of existing work but still hard. Curious, what was your language's interesting properties? "I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp." It might help if you see a modern example. The recent language impressing me the most with its features is Julia: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ Wondering aloud about how they pulled all that off, esp macro's, led someone here to tell me it's actually femtolisp internally: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp So, they appear to have built a simple LISP, then used it to incrementally build a compiler for a complex language. They just represent the syntax internally in a LISP form and work with it from there. Don't know much more than that but it shows the power of the concept. Better demo is the one below as it goes step-by-step in stages. One commenter (Orion63) pointed out the author was re-using the proven cheat: "build a LISP, do it all in LISP, profit." Haha. I've considered duplicating that work with different language options. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065
      - tormeh 11y ago
        My language's main feature was deterministic multithreading, of the synchronous school. It also forced a certain structure: All threads started and the shared variables they can write to have to be in the same area, arguments are always named, and sequence doesn't matter (optional in Python), shared variables can only be written to by one thread, but read by all. In contrast to some other deterministic multithreading solutions, the sequence in which IO is effected is also deterministic, not only the sequence of application to shared variables. The compiler had a typechecker and compiles to C++, using GCC to do the rest. I guess I should submit it to HN sometime...

nickpsecurity 11y ago

As a personal exercise, you should compare making a LISP interpreter or compiler to Wirth's treatment on doing an imperative language sometime. The difference is a 100-200 pages of work. Plus, the LISP can self-modify during compile to add any subsequent feature. It's not machismo: it's just the design of LISP. Easy to parse, easy to modify, easy to evaluate, data as code, basic primitives that express anything else at least acceptably, and on 50's-60's hardware. Additionally, building a useful LISP (esp Scheme) is an academic exercise done all over the world that's fairly easy even for amateurs. Building a useful, non-optimizing C++ compiler with only a subset of LISP capabilities is an exercise only undertaken by masochists very dedicated to compiler design. Even a prototype is easier for LISP (a few pages of code) while a prototype of C++ or even C's semantics is much more challenging. So, the empirical evidence counters your claim in terms of completed projects, their complexity, and features received in return.

kornish 11y ago

> I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it's interpreted, but it's not that easy. As an example, here's a guide for writing a Scheme interpreter in a matter of hours: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_... It definitely doesn't take it months to walk away with a working implementation. Whether or not the language you've just written is actually useful or preferable to alternatives is a different question, and there I agree with you that communities, libraries, and language maturity can take a long time to build. Lisp's simple syntax makes it a prime target for creating new dialects (like Clojure) to experiment with semantics.