7 ms·

It's interesting, I'm reading Black Swan at the moment by Nassim Taleb, and one of his big rants is about how we get blinded by idealized, platonic forms and id

It's interesting, I'm reading Black Swan at the moment by Nassim Taleb, and one of his big rants is about how we get blinded by idealized, platonic forms and ideas when the real world is messy and inherently unpredictable. E.g. trying to explain the forms of nature with platonic archetypal shapes like circles, rectangles and triangles. Lisp and the community around it kinda has that flavor - getting lost in a world of "pure forms" and grand ideas, but downplaying the important but messy practical reality of hardware, useful libraries, and getting cool stuff done with a minimum of fuss. I'm periodically fascinated by Lisp (I wrote an interpreter or two in C) but I wonder if its "Platonicity" is part of its downfall.

mbrock 10y ago
I don't think actual Lisp programmers share this obsession with purity and ideal forms. It's more something that shows up in blog posts about Lisp by people who probably don't actually use it. The title of this one is telling: it's about "the idea of Lisp." On the other hand, if you look at, say, ANSI Common Lisp, it's not at all some kind of perfectionistic attempt at divine elegance. It's a pragmatic compromise resulting from years, decades, of actual use on real computers. Just browse around the SBCL compiler source code and you'll see that this stuff is developed by people who definitely aren't afraid of the messy practical reality of hardware: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/tree/master/src/compiler/x86-64 https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/tree/master/src/compiler/x86-64 Generally spend some time within the Lisp community and see how many people you see fretting over Platonic archetypal shapes and compare to people solving actual problems and using the language as just a nice way to program a computer. Emacs is another example that demonstrates the spirit of actual Lisp programming as opposed to armchair theorizing about lambda calculus fundamentals.
- goatlover 10y ago
  But then again, there's Scheme ...
  - cicero 10y ago
    Even Schemes can take a practical turn, e.g. Racket.
    - omaranto 10y ago
      Or Chicken.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Racket isn't Scheme. It is its own dialect. That's why it's no longer called Scheme. At present, there are only a few Schemes that are practical: Chicken, Guile, Chez, and Gambit seem to be the big players, with Cyclone, Chibi, and Bigloo bringing up the rear.
      - dTal 10y ago
        Wow, pedantic much? It started out as a pure Scheme, then "took a practical turn" as the parent said. You can still make it act like a pure Scheme with a #lang directive. It's also kind of funny that a handful of major, practical implementations is considered a low amount. Number of Python implementations? Between one and three, depending on definition. Number of Javas? 2 or 3 again. Number of Clojure implementations? One. Javascript? Half a dozen at most. Seems to me like the problem is standardization between these implementations, not overall number.
        grzm 10y ago
        Number of Clojure implementations? One. At least three: - Clojure on the JVM: https://github.com/clojure/clojure https://github.com/clojure/clojure - ClojureScript (JavaScript): https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript - Clojure on the CLR: https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr
        dTal 10y ago
        I stand corrected. That was the only one I didn't check out. I didn't know about Clojure on the CLR but in fairness I should have remembered Clojurescript.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Specially since Lisp was once upon a time, also a systems programming language.
- QuadrupleA 10y ago
  That's good perspective. My lens on it has mostly been stuff like SICP, Paul Graham's old essays, periodic Lisp HN posts etc. Good to hear there's a community out there that's fine with the messy practical stuff.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  ANSI Common Lisp is rather a design-by-committee monstrosity which was forced on the unwilling Lisp vendors by the Defense Department. Most of the feature set was designed via backroom political horse trading ("We'll let you include pet feature X if you support us for our pet feature Y".) There is no coherent overall plan or design to it at all. (Source: personal communication from a member of the committee that designed it.) It's based on actual use on real computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s -- e.g. the file opening mechanism is a complex abstraction designed to support filesystem paradigms that nobody has used for 30 years, yet there is no standard way to open a TCP socket. I heartily recommend Clojure (clojure.org) as an alternative: a modern, pragmatic Lisp designed for 2016-era software engineering.
  - cesarbs 10y ago
    What about ISLISP? Granted, there are much fewer implementations compared to CL.
  - bluefox 10y ago
    Why do you have to resort to such bullshit in order to promote your favorite language. Please back up your claims.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Clojure's an odd, unlispish language, at least for us Lispers and Schemers. CL is still very good at what it does: all current implementations have solved many of the problems you mentioned, and there are a lot of libraries that will run across implementations. CL is a beast, but clojure is a mess. Scheme is elegant, but has a radically different, more ALGOL mentality than CL, at least in some respects. Some of it is good, some is bad. I love it, but there are things that I would rather program in CL any day. IMHO, clojure has neither the practicality of CL nor the elegance of Scheme. It has its advantages, but it's not ideal.
    - anoctopus 10y ago
      Could you explain what you think is wrong with Clojure? Maybe it's because I've spent far more time using it than CL, but I see Clojure as having a very consistent, well designed core. It's very opinionated in it's design, but it's a practical and pragmatic one. I don't see what's unlispish about it.
chubot 10y ago
Yes, I really like Taleb's books because they are about the gap between theory and practice -- and in particular, how to make bets and take action to discover that gap. His later books go into this too: how academics rewrite history in favor of the ideas they created, but "tinkerers" create history. I believe he uses the example of the Wright brothers. Were they physicists? No, they were engineers and tinkerers. And what is amazing is that people still argue about the physics of how planes fly!!! Practice often precedes theory. Whether there's a similar phenomenon in computing is an interesting question. Computing is sort of special because the finished product, a program, is probably the closest thing to a pure idea that you will find in engineering (as opposed to a plane or a telescope). It is created almost entirely in the human mind. On the one hand, you could say that what you learn in school is idealized and gives academics too much credit. To use a recent example, what was the contribution of Phil Katz vs. academic research in compression? That would make for an interesting essay I would love to read. What about BitTorrent, or BitCoin? I believe plenty of academics were trying to create systems like BitTorrent, and publishing papers about them, but Bram Cohen said he pulled a bunch of magic numbers out of his butt and dealt with router quirks, and made it work. But certainly he also used computer science. I like this essay, "Notes on postmodern programming": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16064138633971247776&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16064138633971247... Some excerpts: The word “algorithm” is often claimed as the central concept of computer science [35] “Algorithm”, however, leaves out large amounts of the discipline of programming: components, patterns, protocols, languages, data structures [76]. There is equal acceptance of high and low culture: Visual Basic and Haskell are equally of interest, as there is no reason to applaud the one and disparage the other Postmodern programming rejects overarching grand narratives. As a result, it favours descriptive reasoning rather than prescriptive. Rather than working top down from a theory towards practice, postmodern programming theories are built up, following practice.
icheishvili 10y ago
This is the challenge I have as well. I want to use Lisp for a lot of things but the reality is that parsing PDFs, tagging parts of speech, and then throwing it all into Postgres/Elasticsearch is a lot easier with a bunch of "gem install" commands than anything I've seen for Common Lisp.
- white-flame 10y ago
  (ql:quickload "packagename") works great in Common Lisp. The QuickLisp package manager has been around for a few years now.
  - icheishvili 10y ago
    QL is a package manager. I'm talking ecosystem/libraries. Use QL to install postmodern and tell me how you feel about its time zone support.
pjlegato 10y ago
Quite right. That's why Clojure was invented. Clojure is a modern Lisp with the explicit goal of being a practical and pragmatic Lisp intended for getting real-world software engineering tasks done, not just a grand walled garden with beautiful and pure ideas but without standard libraries for stuff like, say, "opening a TCP socket".
- kazinator 10y ago
  CL has no ISO standard library for opening a TCP socket. Clojure has no ISO standard library for opening a TCP socket. I don't see the difference. Usocket: Common Lisp socket library: https://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/#implementations https://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/#implementations Walled garden? I can make a native executable for Windows using any one of several Lisp implementations. No framework or VM or whatever required. Clojure saves some people from programming the JVM in Java; good for them.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
If you want to see a Lisp desiged for practicality (other than CL, which definitely was, make no mistake), Kaz Kylheku (who goes by kazinator around here)'s TXR is a neat thing. It's a combination of Lisp and a pattern matching language, desiged for data-munging tasks similar to those done by AWK and Perl. But it's actually better than AWK (I won't go so far as to say it's better than Perl: it is, however, more regular than Perl, which is a nice thing), because the pattern matching language was designed with multiline records in mind, and is a lot more readable than a long regex, IMHO. And the built-in lisp was deliberately optimized for succinctness, something many lisps don't do well. You can find some examples at http://www.nongnu.org/txr/ http://www.nongnu.org/txr/. And if that's not practical, I don't know what is.

mbrock 10y ago

I don't think actual Lisp programmers share this obsession with purity and ideal forms. It's more something that shows up in blog posts about Lisp by people who probably don't actually use it. The title of this one is telling: it's about "the idea of Lisp." On the other hand, if you look at, say, ANSI Common Lisp, it's not at all some kind of perfectionistic attempt at divine elegance. It's a pragmatic compromise resulting from years, decades, of actual use on real computers. Just browse around the SBCL compiler source code and you'll see that this stuff is developed by people who definitely aren't afraid of the messy practical reality of hardware: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/tree/master/src/compiler/x86-64 https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/tree/master/src/compiler/x86-64 Generally spend some time within the Lisp community and see how many people you see fretting over Platonic archetypal shapes and compare to people solving actual problems and using the language as just a nice way to program a computer. Emacs is another example that demonstrates the spirit of actual Lisp programming as opposed to armchair theorizing about lambda calculus fundamentals.

goatlover 10y ago
But then again, there's Scheme ...
- cicero 10y ago
  Even Schemes can take a practical turn, e.g. Racket.
  - omaranto 10y ago
    Or Chicken.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Racket isn't Scheme. It is its own dialect. That's why it's no longer called Scheme. At present, there are only a few Schemes that are practical: Chicken, Guile, Chez, and Gambit seem to be the big players, with Cyclone, Chibi, and Bigloo bringing up the rear.
    - dTal 10y ago
      Wow, pedantic much? It started out as a pure Scheme, then "took a practical turn" as the parent said. You can still make it act like a pure Scheme with a #lang directive. It's also kind of funny that a handful of major, practical implementations is considered a low amount. Number of Python implementations? Between one and three, depending on definition. Number of Javas? 2 or 3 again. Number of Clojure implementations? One. Javascript? Half a dozen at most. Seems to me like the problem is standardization between these implementations, not overall number.
      - grzm 10y ago
        Number of Clojure implementations? One. At least three: - Clojure on the JVM: https://github.com/clojure/clojure https://github.com/clojure/clojure - ClojureScript (JavaScript): https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript - Clojure on the CLR: https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr
        dTal 10y ago
        I stand corrected. That was the only one I didn't check out. I didn't know about Clojure on the CLR but in fairness I should have remembered Clojurescript.
pjmlp 10y ago
Specially since Lisp was once upon a time, also a systems programming language.
QuadrupleA 10y ago
That's good perspective. My lens on it has mostly been stuff like SICP, Paul Graham's old essays, periodic Lisp HN posts etc. Good to hear there's a community out there that's fine with the messy practical stuff.
pjlegato 10y ago
ANSI Common Lisp is rather a design-by-committee monstrosity which was forced on the unwilling Lisp vendors by the Defense Department. Most of the feature set was designed via backroom political horse trading ("We'll let you include pet feature X if you support us for our pet feature Y".) There is no coherent overall plan or design to it at all. (Source: personal communication from a member of the committee that designed it.) It's based on actual use on real computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s -- e.g. the file opening mechanism is a complex abstraction designed to support filesystem paradigms that nobody has used for 30 years, yet there is no standard way to open a TCP socket. I heartily recommend Clojure (clojure.org) as an alternative: a modern, pragmatic Lisp designed for 2016-era software engineering.
- cesarbs 10y ago
  What about ISLISP? Granted, there are much fewer implementations compared to CL.
- bluefox 10y ago
  Why do you have to resort to such bullshit in order to promote your favorite language. Please back up your claims.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Clojure's an odd, unlispish language, at least for us Lispers and Schemers. CL is still very good at what it does: all current implementations have solved many of the problems you mentioned, and there are a lot of libraries that will run across implementations. CL is a beast, but clojure is a mess. Scheme is elegant, but has a radically different, more ALGOL mentality than CL, at least in some respects. Some of it is good, some is bad. I love it, but there are things that I would rather program in CL any day. IMHO, clojure has neither the practicality of CL nor the elegance of Scheme. It has its advantages, but it's not ideal.
  - anoctopus 10y ago
    Could you explain what you think is wrong with Clojure? Maybe it's because I've spent far more time using it than CL, but I see Clojure as having a very consistent, well designed core. It's very opinionated in it's design, but it's a practical and pragmatic one. I don't see what's unlispish about it.

chubot 10y ago

Yes, I really like Taleb's books because they are about the gap between theory and practice -- and in particular, how to make bets and take action to discover that gap. His later books go into this too: how academics rewrite history in favor of the ideas they created, but "tinkerers" create history. I believe he uses the example of the Wright brothers. Were they physicists? No, they were engineers and tinkerers. And what is amazing is that people still argue about the physics of how planes fly!!! Practice often precedes theory. Whether there's a similar phenomenon in computing is an interesting question. Computing is sort of special because the finished product, a program, is probably the closest thing to a pure idea that you will find in engineering (as opposed to a plane or a telescope). It is created almost entirely in the human mind. On the one hand, you could say that what you learn in school is idealized and gives academics too much credit. To use a recent example, what was the contribution of Phil Katz vs. academic research in compression? That would make for an interesting essay I would love to read. What about BitTorrent, or BitCoin? I believe plenty of academics were trying to create systems like BitTorrent, and publishing papers about them, but Bram Cohen said he pulled a bunch of magic numbers out of his butt and dealt with router quirks, and made it work. But certainly he also used computer science. I like this essay, "Notes on postmodern programming": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16064138633971247776&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16064138633971247... Some excerpts: The word “algorithm” is often claimed as the central concept of computer science [35] “Algorithm”, however, leaves out large amounts of the discipline of programming: components, patterns, protocols, languages, data structures [76]. There is equal acceptance of high and low culture: Visual Basic and Haskell are equally of interest, as there is no reason to applaud the one and disparage the other Postmodern programming rejects overarching grand narratives. As a result, it favours descriptive reasoning rather than prescriptive. Rather than working top down from a theory towards practice, postmodern programming theories are built up, following practice.

icheishvili 10y ago

This is the challenge I have as well. I want to use Lisp for a lot of things but the reality is that parsing PDFs, tagging parts of speech, and then throwing it all into Postgres/Elasticsearch is a lot easier with a bunch of "gem install" commands than anything I've seen for Common Lisp.

white-flame 10y ago
(ql:quickload "packagename") works great in Common Lisp. The QuickLisp package manager has been around for a few years now.
- icheishvili 10y ago
  QL is a package manager. I'm talking ecosystem/libraries. Use QL to install postmodern and tell me how you feel about its time zone support.

pjlegato 10y ago

Quite right. That's why Clojure was invented. Clojure is a modern Lisp with the explicit goal of being a practical and pragmatic Lisp intended for getting real-world software engineering tasks done, not just a grand walled garden with beautiful and pure ideas but without standard libraries for stuff like, say, "opening a TCP socket".

kazinator 10y ago
CL has no ISO standard library for opening a TCP socket. Clojure has no ISO standard library for opening a TCP socket. I don't see the difference. Usocket: Common Lisp socket library: https://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/#implementations https://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/#implementations Walled garden? I can make a native executable for Windows using any one of several Lisp implementations. No framework or VM or whatever required. Clojure saves some people from programming the JVM in Java; good for them.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

If you want to see a Lisp desiged for practicality (other than CL, which definitely was, make no mistake), Kaz Kylheku (who goes by kazinator around here)'s TXR is a neat thing. It's a combination of Lisp and a pattern matching language, desiged for data-munging tasks similar to those done by AWK and Perl. But it's actually better than AWK (I won't go so far as to say it's better than Perl: it is, however, more regular than Perl, which is a nice thing), because the pattern matching language was designed with multiline records in mind, and is a lot more readable than a long regex, IMHO. And the built-in lisp was deliberately optimized for succinctness, something many lisps don't do well. You can find some examples at http://www.nongnu.org/txr/ http://www.nongnu.org/txr/. And if that's not practical, I don't know what is.