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Um. Here's the first part of Clojure's docs [0]. Compare and contrast: "A pitch is a frequency. 440Hz is an A pitch. There are twelve pitches. Each pitch differ

Um. Here's the first part of Clojure's docs [0]. Compare and contrast: "A pitch is a frequency. 440Hz is an A pitch. There are twelve pitches. Each pitch differs from the previous pitch by the multiplicative constant twelfth-root-of-two. Twelve pitches in a row doubles the frequency, creating an octave." It only takes four or five paragraphs to mathematically describe the basis for chromatic notation. If Clojure fully contained all its abstractions, then it would not have the option of calling into the JVM. Clojure does not have the property that cutting any fragment of a valid program yields a valid program. There are languages in the concatenative style which have this property, but even there, the ability to compose does not guarantee the ability to split. If you think that types produce reliability, then you do not understand types. You seem dedicated to Clojure, which is great, but music is thousands of years older and has figured out a lot of stuff. I think that you also missed my bigger point, which is that programming is roughly at the same point in its art that cave painting was at hundreds of thousands of years ago. If you think that Lisps are beautiful and Clojure is the pinnacle, then I think that you don't know beauty. But it's not your fault; you've never seen anything beautiful. None of us have. And none of us ever will, at the current rate of progress. Here, have a video to provoke some thoughts: [1] [0] https://clojure.org/reference/reader https://clojure.org/reference/reader [1] https://vimeo.com/74354480 https://vimeo.com/74354480

didibus 9y ago
I think that you also missed my bigger point Indeed I did. I'm not claiming Lisps and Clojure to be the be all end all of programming languages, I hope not. That said, I think you're being a little dramatic. Beauty really doesn't exist, its an illusion fabricated by a mix of our culture and our genetic predispositions. It's mostly characterized by the emotions it evokes in you. Clojure and Lisps, currently of all languages I've tried, evoke the strongest set of positive emotions in me, the strongest one being joy. And I think some of it is not without merit. Still, beauty is not what I'm talking about. I like quantifiable measures. You have productivity, explorativity, understandability, performance and correctness. Clojure finds a good balance between these, it tries to maximise the average of them all. Which is why I find it's great for your average programming project. I don't yet know of a language which does a better job at this maximization, but I'm always on the outlook for one. It only takes four or five paragraphs to mathematically describe the basis for chromatic notation. Its just as short to describe the basis of Lisps, that is the lambda calculus. Also, chromatic notation is less powerful then lambda calculus notation, much less, yet lambda calculus notation isn't much longer to describe. I'm also not sure shortness is necessarily better or more beautiful, again, that's an esthetic preference like minimalism in art. With nine constructs you can have a full Lisp impmementation that can do all turing equivalent computations and also I/O. But in practice, having even more turns out to be useful and makes things easier. I think it's the same for Forth too. If Clojure fully contained all its abstractions, then it would not have the option of calling into the JVM. I'm not sure this has any practical merits, but there's nothing in Clojure preventing this. It could, in fact self-hosted ClojureScript does. It's not very useful, which is why Clojure doesn't bother, and calling into the JVM is actually quite useful, to leverage lots of existing code. Clojure does not have the property that cutting any fragment of a valid program yields a valid program. You can cut anywhere an sexpr starts or ends and get a valid program. Maybe that's not granular enough for you, but what is? In forth you can cut at any whitespace and get a valid program, but I could claim it's not granular enough, I want to cut at any character. To me, the property is that the notation is recursive, it builds on itself. Sure the unit being an sexpr is not as small a unit as a single musical note, but that unit is independent, composable and nestable. If you think that types produce reliability, then you do not understand types. I don't, I didn't use that word at all. In fact I believe Clojure programs to be very reliable, even though they don't have static types. Here, have a video to provoke some thoughts Thanks, always looking for thought provoking thoughts, I have not watched it yet, but will.
didibus 9y ago
I've seen the video, it sums up my thought pretty well. I knew all of it already though. But now I'm really confused, I thought we were disagreeing? I'm exactly saying that I believe the ability to quickly run and test your program is most important, more so then to prove properties from its code description. And that's specifically the strengths of Lisp dialects like Clojure. Are you saying something different?

didibus 9y ago

I think that you also missed my bigger point Indeed I did. I'm not claiming Lisps and Clojure to be the be all end all of programming languages, I hope not. That said, I think you're being a little dramatic. Beauty really doesn't exist, its an illusion fabricated by a mix of our culture and our genetic predispositions. It's mostly characterized by the emotions it evokes in you. Clojure and Lisps, currently of all languages I've tried, evoke the strongest set of positive emotions in me, the strongest one being joy. And I think some of it is not without merit. Still, beauty is not what I'm talking about. I like quantifiable measures. You have productivity, explorativity, understandability, performance and correctness. Clojure finds a good balance between these, it tries to maximise the average of them all. Which is why I find it's great for your average programming project. I don't yet know of a language which does a better job at this maximization, but I'm always on the outlook for one. It only takes four or five paragraphs to mathematically describe the basis for chromatic notation. Its just as short to describe the basis of Lisps, that is the lambda calculus. Also, chromatic notation is less powerful then lambda calculus notation, much less, yet lambda calculus notation isn't much longer to describe. I'm also not sure shortness is necessarily better or more beautiful, again, that's an esthetic preference like minimalism in art. With nine constructs you can have a full Lisp impmementation that can do all turing equivalent computations and also I/O. But in practice, having even more turns out to be useful and makes things easier. I think it's the same for Forth too. If Clojure fully contained all its abstractions, then it would not have the option of calling into the JVM. I'm not sure this has any practical merits, but there's nothing in Clojure preventing this. It could, in fact self-hosted ClojureScript does. It's not very useful, which is why Clojure doesn't bother, and calling into the JVM is actually quite useful, to leverage lots of existing code. Clojure does not have the property that cutting any fragment of a valid program yields a valid program. You can cut anywhere an sexpr starts or ends and get a valid program. Maybe that's not granular enough for you, but what is? In forth you can cut at any whitespace and get a valid program, but I could claim it's not granular enough, I want to cut at any character. To me, the property is that the notation is recursive, it builds on itself. Sure the unit being an sexpr is not as small a unit as a single musical note, but that unit is independent, composable and nestable. If you think that types produce reliability, then you do not understand types. I don't, I didn't use that word at all. In fact I believe Clojure programs to be very reliable, even though they don't have static types. Here, have a video to provoke some thoughts Thanks, always looking for thought provoking thoughts, I have not watched it yet, but will.

didibus 9y ago

I've seen the video, it sums up my thought pretty well. I knew all of it already though. But now I'm really confused, I thought we were disagreeing? I'm exactly saying that I believe the ability to quickly run and test your program is most important, more so then to prove properties from its code description. And that's specifically the strengths of Lisp dialects like Clojure. Are you saying something different?