5 ms·

I am really curious about the kind of tasks that are easily done in Go but for which Lisp doesn't quite fit.

• _ph_ 10y ago
  Sometimes I like to have a fully statically typechecked program. You can do that in Lisp, its easier in Go. Also, it directly produces statically linked executables. You can do a lot of this in SBCL, it also produces executables, has type checking etc. But for some of this, you have to wrestle a bit with the Lisp system. The Common Lisp numeric tower is great - until you want to write low level programs where you just want to have machine word sized integers which may wrap around. I once even submitted an abstract to a Lisp conference addressing some of these issues, but as it was not accepted, this side-project was postponed (but I plan to revive it some day). And of course, there is always the question of the environment. The Go universe has tons of libraries, actively developed.
  • devishard 10y ago
    > Sometimes I like to have a fully statically typechecked program. Wait, I thought we were talking about situations where Go was appropriate. What do you use when you want a fully statically typechecked program?
    • scott_s 10y ago
      Please don't do this. You obviously disagree that Go is a language which provides full static typechecking. Please instead just state that disagreement, rather than feign confusion. It leads to much better discussions.
      • premium-concern 10y ago
        Why do Go advocates never have any technical response to facts they dislike, but always respond with complaints about the tone in which the fact was voiced?
      • devishard 10y ago
        We would have a lot better discussions if people bothered to educate themselves about static typechecking before making claims about it on Hacker News.
        • scott_s 10y ago
          HN advocates the principle of charity - assuming the best possible intentions of the people you're talking to. In this case, that would mean assuming this person means something different when they use the phrase "fully statically typechecked", stating what you mean when you say it, and possibly linking to some source material to help further explain. It's quite possible they have the same understanding you do, they just are using the terms differently.
          • devishard 10y ago
            Okay, why don't you assume in everything I'm talking about fluffy rainbow butterflies or something nice like that? Principle of charity, right? That way we can both go our separate ways happily. If someone doesn't mean "fully statically typechecked" then they shouldn't say "fully statically typechecked". It's not an ambiguous phrase.
            • scott_s 10y ago
              That is not what it means: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html People have different backgrounds and and experiences. It's reasonable for a person to think "fully statically typechecked" to mean "a program which is statically typechecked, and it does so to the entire program". That would apply to languages such as C, C++ and Go, which are statically typed, but give ways to subvert the type system. You probably mean something closer to "a program which has fully sound static typing", more along the lines of the MLs or Haskell, which have a richer type system which you cannot subvert. We're here for interesting discussion. Derision is not a part of interesting discussion. You're relatively new here, so I figure it's worth explaining this explicitly.
              • 10y ago
  • junke 10y ago
    I guess I don't write the same kind of tools as you, I never need word sized integers. Generally, I define the types according to the problem domain and don't require a specific bit layout. A different case arises when you exchange data through a given protocol, but then you don't do computation with it, just encode/decode.
    • _ph_ 10y ago
      Word sized integers are fast to compute. So as long as your problem can be expressed with them, it is the fastest way to perform math. When using Common Lisp, I have flexible sized integer numbers, which is nice to have, but the performance penalty can be sometimes too high.
  • unscaled 10y ago
    If you're looking for a FULLY statically typechecked program, you can easily do better than Go. Heck, even using Typescript or Javascript with Flow would give stronger typing than Go with its ubiquitous "interface{}". Static executables by default is something that Go is famously good at, but I'm pretty sure Haskell can do this as well without so much pain and with a type system many times stronger than Go's.