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Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? Being

Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? Being able to apply the resulting work to the real world is very hard, because for a programmer - you have to package it up in a way that's easily digestible to people who don't want to have to go through the process of reinventing the wheel from scratch in order to understand it (or just don't have the time to). Lisp doesn't have to be complicated with a billion bells and whistles to be good lisp code. If you approach learning it from there, you build your own, don't have to compare it to PhD level research. It might one day get to that point, where no one can understand or wants to understand what you've created, but that's the other side - the isolation that comes with being an academic.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? The subtlety here is that there is the complexity inherent to the problem domain, which is what you are referring to, and code complexity that arises from translating that complexity to a programming context. Environments like SciPy, Matlab, R, and Julia get rid of a lot of the latter while still forcing certain conventions to follow that make the code easier to read for outsiders, leaving the complexity of the algorithm itself. And I probably should have used Julia instead of Python as an example, since it aims and IMO succeeds as a "goldilocks" language that combines a lot of great ideas from all aforementioned languages plus Lisp[0]. IIRC, it is sometimes jokingly referred to as "secretly a Lisp" because part of the compiler is writting in... I think Scheme? [0] https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogramming/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogram...
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Yes, that's what I'm referring to.
- ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
  >IIRC, it is sometimes jokingly referred to as "secretly a Lisp" because part of the compiler is writting in... I think Scheme? Femtolisp, created by Jeff Bezanson who is also a co-creator of Julia.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> Honestly, a PhD is the culmination of a very complicated thought process. Why wouldn't the program resulting from research be non-trivial to understand? The subtlety here is that there is the complexity inherent to the problem domain, which is what you are referring to, and code complexity that arises from translating that complexity to a programming context. Environments like SciPy, Matlab, R, and Julia get rid of a lot of the latter while still forcing certain conventions to follow that make the code easier to read for outsiders, leaving the complexity of the algorithm itself. And I probably should have used Julia instead of Python as an example, since it aims and IMO succeeds as a "goldilocks" language that combines a lot of great ideas from all aforementioned languages plus Lisp[0]. IIRC, it is sometimes jokingly referred to as "secretly a Lisp" because part of the compiler is writting in... I think Scheme? [0] https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogramming/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/metaprogram...

s-shellfish 8y ago
Yes, that's what I'm referring to.
ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
>IIRC, it is sometimes jokingly referred to as "secretly a Lisp" because part of the compiler is writting in... I think Scheme? Femtolisp, created by Jeff Bezanson who is also a co-creator of Julia.