5 ms·

There's no one lisp; there are many. Here are the top three: Clojure: http://clojure.org/getting_started http://clojure.org/getting_started Racket: http://doc

by oskarth 11y ago

There's no one lisp; there are many. Here are the top three: Clojure: http://clojure.org/getting_started http://clojure.org/getting_started Racket: http://docs.racket-lang.org/getting-started/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/getting-started/ Common Lisp: https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/ https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/ Lisp is a family of languages. All the dialects are good in their own way - "standardization", if such a thing even makes sense, would be counter-productive.

ridiculous_fish 11y ago
The history of Haskell is described in this PDF: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/history.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... This paper describes the situation in the mid-1980s as a "lazy Tower of Babel" with competing lazy-functional languages like Miranda, MLs, Orwell, Clean, Ponder, each good in its own way, but none of them with critical mass. Thus they decided to create Haskell as a new, common language. No doubt each language designer felt that Haskell compromised on their particular vision, but rallied around it anyways, resulting in a far more potent force for lazy functional programming than ever could have been achieved working separately. Why does this not describe LISP today? Honest question.
- sklogic 11y ago
  Lisp thrives in Babel, while the other kinds of languages may be harmed by it. Lisp is a meta-language and it facilitates building a Babel tower of eDSLs for each and every little project. It is the main source of its unmatched power.
  - ridiculous_fish 11y ago
    But this doesn't require the proliferation of implementations. Each little project doesn't require its own garbage collector, for example. The paper I linked discusses some of the "practical" areas of Haskell: profiling, debugging, packaging, FFI, compiler errors and optimizations, etc. Surely there's a lot of energy being expended replicating this stuff across the various Lisp implementations?
    - mbrock 11y ago
      There happens to be wide community consensus around a single Haskell compiler, GHC, at the moment, but that's a contingency and there are some other compilers, interpreters, and stuff like GHCJS. Profiling and debugging support is a feature of GHC (and other implementations), not of the language standard. Common Lisp has unified packaging and FFI and stuff through various community projects like ASDF and Quicklisp. If you're talking about Lisp in the general vague sense of "Lisps" then there can't be general interoperability because that umbrella term covers lots of very different languages with no formal common ground.
    - zodmaner 11y ago
      There aren't that many Lisp implementations, especially those that are considered to be mature and ready for production. For Common Lisp, the open source ones are SBCL and Clozure CL, and the proprietary ones are Allegro CL and LispWorks. For Scheme, there are Racket (PLT Scheme), Chicken Scheme, and Guile. I'm quite certain that the majority of people who use Common Lisp and/or Scheme use one of the aforementioned implementations.
    - sklogic 11y ago
      Even GC cannot be a common ground for everything. Take a look at Harlan, a Lisp-like language with a region-based memory management. Unification harms diversity and flexibility.
- mbrock 11y ago
  It describes Common Lisp. Scheme is another language with its own common standards. The way people are so quick to talk about "Lisp" as a general meta-language is kind of confusing. We could invent a definition by which Ruby, Python, and Perl are "really the same language" that just failed to standardize, but that would be obviously silly.
  - gonewest 11y ago
    You could say Ruby, Python, Perl, C, Java, etc are really ALGOL-like languages whose data structures are generally mutable, and whose syntax is made for expressing how the state of the program is mutated in-place. Whereas LISP-like languages have data structures that are generally immutable, and whose functional orientation results in expressing the computation of new data from old (mostly) without mutating in-place. The thing about imperative programming languages is that the paradigm matches up to the mental model of "a computer" that most programmers would recognize and find comfortable. Without having any concrete evidence, I have a hunch that this paradigm difference is what deters new developers the most. And stacked on top of that you have the non-ALGOL syntax and the lack of libraries. In my opinion, anyway.
    - mbrock 11y ago
      Your opinion is about an idea of Lisp that's simply not true. Both Common Lisp and Scheme are pervasively mutable and imperative constructs occur just as often as in "Algol." Clojure diverges from this with its nice immutable data structures, but that's a rather novel and distinguishing feature, not a core trait of "Lisp." I'm curious about where the idea originated that Lisp is an especially non-mutating language. Some of it is just that it's a garbage collected language with first class functions, so it's easy to classify it as "functional" which has associations to "pure functional." But Lisp is very far from a pure functional language. It's more like a general multi-paradigm language—like Perl and Ruby.
- zodmaner 11y ago
  Common Lisp _IS_ the consolidation of various Lisp dialects that you've asked about. Back in the 70s and 80s there are numerous Lisp dialects (way, _way_ more then there are today, since each dialects has their own sub-dialect and so forth), and so Common Lisp was created back in the 80s (the work started in 1981 and finished in 1994) to unified various Lisp dialects into one common language. And Common Lisp accomplishes that objective, well mostly anyway. Soon(-ish) most people, companies, and institutions ported their Lisp code base to Common Lisp, and by the late 80's and early 90's, when you say Lisp most people will (correctly) assume that you mean Common Lisp, not MacLisp or InterLisp, or some earlier, long depreciated dialects. You can read more about the nitty gritty details in the Evolution of Lisp essay by Richard Gabriel here: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html Now, about Scheme. Remember when I said that Common Lisp _mostly_ accomplishes its objective of unifying various Lisp dialects? Yeah, basically the Scheme community didn't like how Common Lisp turns out, so they decided to stick with Scheme. And it is understandable why they feel this way, because despite outward appearance, the two languages are very different, with Scheme focuses on small (and mathematically elegant) core language, while Common Lisp, with its focus on being practical, is a huge language with a standard library that includes everything and a kitchen sink. Scheme also has a totally different evaluation model compared to Common Lisp and its own macro system with emphasis on hygienic. Not to mention that Scheme has its own standard, the R*RS (now in its 6th revision, with 7th in the drafting process). Now, the thing about Common Lisp is that it is very hard, if not downright impossible, to change its standard. This means that it is not easy to make a substantial changes to the language and has the wider community adopt it (and we haven't even talk about changes that will break backward compatibility here). This is one of the reason that Rich Hickey created Clojure as an entirely new Lisp dialect (before this, he had implemented a Java FFI for Common Lisp). Clojure has a new syntax that is far more consistent than Common Lisp (which comes at the cost of breaking backward compatibility), as well as many new and experimental features, such as immutability, asynchronous operations, and the focus on functional programming style. All of these would be very hard to introduce into Common Lisp without significant efforts and time.
  - oskarth 11y ago
    Excellent historical summary!
bitdiddle 11y ago
I would include Guile in this list of lisps :)

by oskarth 11y ago

ridiculous_fish 11y ago

The history of Haskell is described in this PDF: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/history.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... This paper describes the situation in the mid-1980s as a "lazy Tower of Babel" with competing lazy-functional languages like Miranda, MLs, Orwell, Clean, Ponder, each good in its own way, but none of them with critical mass. Thus they decided to create Haskell as a new, common language. No doubt each language designer felt that Haskell compromised on their particular vision, but rallied around it anyways, resulting in a far more potent force for lazy functional programming than ever could have been achieved working separately. Why does this not describe LISP today? Honest question.

sklogic 11y ago
Lisp thrives in Babel, while the other kinds of languages may be harmed by it. Lisp is a meta-language and it facilitates building a Babel tower of eDSLs for each and every little project. It is the main source of its unmatched power.
- ridiculous_fish 11y ago
  But this doesn't require the proliferation of implementations. Each little project doesn't require its own garbage collector, for example. The paper I linked discusses some of the "practical" areas of Haskell: profiling, debugging, packaging, FFI, compiler errors and optimizations, etc. Surely there's a lot of energy being expended replicating this stuff across the various Lisp implementations?
  - mbrock 11y ago
    There happens to be wide community consensus around a single Haskell compiler, GHC, at the moment, but that's a contingency and there are some other compilers, interpreters, and stuff like GHCJS. Profiling and debugging support is a feature of GHC (and other implementations), not of the language standard. Common Lisp has unified packaging and FFI and stuff through various community projects like ASDF and Quicklisp. If you're talking about Lisp in the general vague sense of "Lisps" then there can't be general interoperability because that umbrella term covers lots of very different languages with no formal common ground.
  - zodmaner 11y ago
    There aren't that many Lisp implementations, especially those that are considered to be mature and ready for production. For Common Lisp, the open source ones are SBCL and Clozure CL, and the proprietary ones are Allegro CL and LispWorks. For Scheme, there are Racket (PLT Scheme), Chicken Scheme, and Guile. I'm quite certain that the majority of people who use Common Lisp and/or Scheme use one of the aforementioned implementations.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    Even GC cannot be a common ground for everything. Take a look at Harlan, a Lisp-like language with a region-based memory management. Unification harms diversity and flexibility.
mbrock 11y ago
It describes Common Lisp. Scheme is another language with its own common standards. The way people are so quick to talk about "Lisp" as a general meta-language is kind of confusing. We could invent a definition by which Ruby, Python, and Perl are "really the same language" that just failed to standardize, but that would be obviously silly.
- gonewest 11y ago
  You could say Ruby, Python, Perl, C, Java, etc are really ALGOL-like languages whose data structures are generally mutable, and whose syntax is made for expressing how the state of the program is mutated in-place. Whereas LISP-like languages have data structures that are generally immutable, and whose functional orientation results in expressing the computation of new data from old (mostly) without mutating in-place. The thing about imperative programming languages is that the paradigm matches up to the mental model of "a computer" that most programmers would recognize and find comfortable. Without having any concrete evidence, I have a hunch that this paradigm difference is what deters new developers the most. And stacked on top of that you have the non-ALGOL syntax and the lack of libraries. In my opinion, anyway.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Your opinion is about an idea of Lisp that's simply not true. Both Common Lisp and Scheme are pervasively mutable and imperative constructs occur just as often as in "Algol." Clojure diverges from this with its nice immutable data structures, but that's a rather novel and distinguishing feature, not a core trait of "Lisp." I'm curious about where the idea originated that Lisp is an especially non-mutating language. Some of it is just that it's a garbage collected language with first class functions, so it's easy to classify it as "functional" which has associations to "pure functional." But Lisp is very far from a pure functional language. It's more like a general multi-paradigm language—like Perl and Ruby.
zodmaner 11y ago
Common Lisp _IS_ the consolidation of various Lisp dialects that you've asked about. Back in the 70s and 80s there are numerous Lisp dialects (way, _way_ more then there are today, since each dialects has their own sub-dialect and so forth), and so Common Lisp was created back in the 80s (the work started in 1981 and finished in 1994) to unified various Lisp dialects into one common language. And Common Lisp accomplishes that objective, well mostly anyway. Soon(-ish) most people, companies, and institutions ported their Lisp code base to Common Lisp, and by the late 80's and early 90's, when you say Lisp most people will (correctly) assume that you mean Common Lisp, not MacLisp or InterLisp, or some earlier, long depreciated dialects. You can read more about the nitty gritty details in the Evolution of Lisp essay by Richard Gabriel here: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html Now, about Scheme. Remember when I said that Common Lisp _mostly_ accomplishes its objective of unifying various Lisp dialects? Yeah, basically the Scheme community didn't like how Common Lisp turns out, so they decided to stick with Scheme. And it is understandable why they feel this way, because despite outward appearance, the two languages are very different, with Scheme focuses on small (and mathematically elegant) core language, while Common Lisp, with its focus on being practical, is a huge language with a standard library that includes everything and a kitchen sink. Scheme also has a totally different evaluation model compared to Common Lisp and its own macro system with emphasis on hygienic. Not to mention that Scheme has its own standard, the R*RS (now in its 6th revision, with 7th in the drafting process). Now, the thing about Common Lisp is that it is very hard, if not downright impossible, to change its standard. This means that it is not easy to make a substantial changes to the language and has the wider community adopt it (and we haven't even talk about changes that will break backward compatibility here). This is one of the reason that Rich Hickey created Clojure as an entirely new Lisp dialect (before this, he had implemented a Java FFI for Common Lisp). Clojure has a new syntax that is far more consistent than Common Lisp (which comes at the cost of breaking backward compatibility), as well as many new and experimental features, such as immutability, asynchronous operations, and the focus on functional programming style. All of these would be very hard to introduce into Common Lisp without significant efforts and time.
- oskarth 11y ago
  Excellent historical summary!

bitdiddle 11y ago

I would include Guile in this list of lisps :)