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> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage. Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? They

> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage. Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" environments you mention. For one, you need to know 5-6 languages to use the web. > Because you use C or one of its derivatives instead of Lisp or one of its derivatives. In Common Lisp you can not only debug a function without restarting your program, you can redefine classes without restarting your program. It is truly awesome. You should try it some time. I think you'll find that pretty much any environment allows this. Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs. On the web, you can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote call entirely. And there's environments that go further. .Net not only lets you debug any C function you run within it, you can even modify it's code from within the debugger and "replay" to the same point. I believe there's a few more proprietary compilers that support that functionality too.

lisper 8y ago
> Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? You should probably direct that question at Patrick because his original question was kind of based on the premise that the answer to your question is "no". My personal opinion? No. OMG no. Javascript and HTML are both poorly designed re-inventions of tiny little corners of Lisp. In that regard they are improvements over C. But no. OMG no. > Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs No, you can't. You can grovel around on the stack and muck with the data structures, but you can't redefine a function, or redefine a class, or change a class's inheritance structure without restarting your program. In Common Lisp you can do all of these things.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Can you/someone explain for this noob why you can't redefine a function, etc.? I'm not a programmer, so I'm imagining you hook in to the call that addresses the function (like modify a jump instruction), overwrite any registers that need changing, nullify caches, so the program runs new code -- this I think is how some hacks work? Ultimately couldn't you just write NOP to addresses used for a function? Is it something structural about C/C++ that stops this, like the ownership of memory (I'm assuming a superuser can tell the computer to ignore that addresses written to are reserved for the program being modified). How does the computer know that you pushed a different long jump in to a particular address and stop working, rather than keep going processing instructions. Apologies if I've misunderstood, please be gentle.
  - lisper 8y ago
    It's a good question, and I'm a little disappointed no one has answered this yet. There is no reason you couldn't redefine a function in C. It's really more of a cultural constraint than a technical one. It's a little tricky, but it could be done. It just so happens that C programmers don't think in terms of interactive programming because C started out as a non-interactive language, and so it has remained mostly a non-interactive language. Lisp, by way of contrast, was interactive and dynamic on day 1, and it has stayed that way. In the early days that made C substantially faster than Lisp, but that performance gap has mostly closed. However, there are some things that Lisp does that are actually impossible in C. The two most notable ones are garbage collection and tail recursion. It's impossible to write a proper GC in portable C because there is no way to walk the stack, and there is no way to compile a tail-call unless you put the entire program inside the body of a single function.
Waterluvian 8y ago
> On the web, you can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote call entirely. This is true if you go to a production website and try to start debugging. But it's untrue for any modern development environment. The minification comes later and even then, source maps are first class supported in browsers, mapping the minified code to the source. It's funny. In my experience the web debug tools are some of the best of any language/environment I've experienced.
- thrower123 8y ago
  No, just no. Web debugging is worse than anything I've ever seen - maybe a bit better than cmd-line debugging with gdb, but not much. Sourcemaps supposedly work, though I have never seen this actually work in practice. And since babel is apparently indispensible, you can't be entirely sure that conditionals and statements in your source haven't been optimized away in the transpilation. Routinely one sets breakpoints in JS files that are not hit by Chrome dev tools, and symbols that should be in scope don't want to be defined. It's a mess. I suppose if you know how to structure the rube goldberg machine correctly, web dev can be productive. But it's so hard, and the hardness is of the tedious yak-shaving variety. I just hate it and want to fire up Visual Studio and write some .NET apps with tools that just work instead.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    "Rube Goldberg" is the best description I've heard for a JS dev stack. So true. Its so awful. But its so much better than it used to be and I pray it continues to improve. I hear what you're saying. They can be really finicky. I've had very good luck using it all cleanly without issue. I especially love binding vscode to an open browser so that I use vscode for all the inspection, breakpoints, etc. But I also experienced your lamentations. It took a long time for me to get it all working. Sourcemaps were so unreliable years ago. Now they just seem to work, having learned all the painful lessons about configuration. There still aren't any sane defaults and the ground won't stop shifting. But now that I have it working, it works great.
sjtgraham 8y ago
> They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) I don’t expect that. Use after free vuln + heap spray + shellcode = Ill effects
ken 8y ago
> They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" environments you mention. For one, you need to know 5-6 languages to use the web. I'm not sure how this is a denial of lisper's argument. You've picked an environment which you admit has major flaws, but those flaws are independent of the issue at hand. I've worked in runtime-perf-above-anything programming environments which required the use of many different languages even for the simplest program. It's terrible there, too. That has nothing to do with dynamic languages. In fact, due to the ease of creating DSLs, most of the dynamic languages I've used allow one to get by with using fewer languages. > On the web, you can't [do this other thing you can do in Lisp], because ... Indeed, you've picked the one modern dynamic environment which lacks most of the features lisper is talking about. That's not an argument against having those features. I think it's mostly an observation that this particular environment picked a different attribute (runtime security) to optimize for above all else. You'll note that JS-style security is fundamentally incompatible with many of the concepts in OP's original question. > I think you'll find that pretty much any environment allows this. Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs. Can you give an example? I've never heard of a C++ system that let you redefine classes at runtime without debug symbols. I can't imagine how it would work. How would you even inspect the classes at runtime to find out what you're redefining?

lisper 8y ago

> Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? You should probably direct that question at Patrick because his original question was kind of based on the premise that the answer to your question is "no". My personal opinion? No. OMG no. Javascript and HTML are both poorly designed re-inventions of tiny little corners of Lisp. In that regard they are improvements over C. But no. OMG no. > Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs No, you can't. You can grovel around on the stack and muck with the data structures, but you can't redefine a function, or redefine a class, or change a class's inheritance structure without restarting your program. In Common Lisp you can do all of these things.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Can you/someone explain for this noob why you can't redefine a function, etc.? I'm not a programmer, so I'm imagining you hook in to the call that addresses the function (like modify a jump instruction), overwrite any registers that need changing, nullify caches, so the program runs new code -- this I think is how some hacks work? Ultimately couldn't you just write NOP to addresses used for a function? Is it something structural about C/C++ that stops this, like the ownership of memory (I'm assuming a superuser can tell the computer to ignore that addresses written to are reserved for the program being modified). How does the computer know that you pushed a different long jump in to a particular address and stop working, rather than keep going processing instructions. Apologies if I've misunderstood, please be gentle.
- lisper 8y ago
  It's a good question, and I'm a little disappointed no one has answered this yet. There is no reason you couldn't redefine a function in C. It's really more of a cultural constraint than a technical one. It's a little tricky, but it could be done. It just so happens that C programmers don't think in terms of interactive programming because C started out as a non-interactive language, and so it has remained mostly a non-interactive language. Lisp, by way of contrast, was interactive and dynamic on day 1, and it has stayed that way. In the early days that made C substantially faster than Lisp, but that performance gap has mostly closed. However, there are some things that Lisp does that are actually impossible in C. The two most notable ones are garbage collection and tail recursion. It's impossible to write a proper GC in portable C because there is no way to walk the stack, and there is no way to compile a tail-call unless you put the entire program inside the body of a single function.

Waterluvian 8y ago

> On the web, you can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote call entirely. This is true if you go to a production website and try to start debugging. But it's untrue for any modern development environment. The minification comes later and even then, source maps are first class supported in browsers, mapping the minified code to the source. It's funny. In my experience the web debug tools are some of the best of any language/environment I've experienced.

thrower123 8y ago
No, just no. Web debugging is worse than anything I've ever seen - maybe a bit better than cmd-line debugging with gdb, but not much. Sourcemaps supposedly work, though I have never seen this actually work in practice. And since babel is apparently indispensible, you can't be entirely sure that conditionals and statements in your source haven't been optimized away in the transpilation. Routinely one sets breakpoints in JS files that are not hit by Chrome dev tools, and symbols that should be in scope don't want to be defined. It's a mess. I suppose if you know how to structure the rube goldberg machine correctly, web dev can be productive. But it's so hard, and the hardness is of the tedious yak-shaving variety. I just hate it and want to fire up Visual Studio and write some .NET apps with tools that just work instead.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  "Rube Goldberg" is the best description I've heard for a JS dev stack. So true. Its so awful. But its so much better than it used to be and I pray it continues to improve. I hear what you're saying. They can be really finicky. I've had very good luck using it all cleanly without issue. I especially love binding vscode to an open browser so that I use vscode for all the inspection, breakpoints, etc. But I also experienced your lamentations. It took a long time for me to get it all working. Sourcemaps were so unreliable years ago. Now they just seem to work, having learned all the painful lessons about configuration. There still aren't any sane defaults and the ground won't stop shifting. But now that I have it working, it works great.

sjtgraham 8y ago

> They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) I don’t expect that. Use after free vuln + heap spray + shellcode = Ill effects

ken 8y ago

> They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" environments you mention. For one, you need to know 5-6 languages to use the web. I'm not sure how this is a denial of lisper's argument. You've picked an environment which you admit has major flaws, but those flaws are independent of the issue at hand. I've worked in runtime-perf-above-anything programming environments which required the use of many different languages even for the simplest program. It's terrible there, too. That has nothing to do with dynamic languages. In fact, due to the ease of creating DSLs, most of the dynamic languages I've used allow one to get by with using fewer languages. > On the web, you can't [do this other thing you can do in Lisp], because ... Indeed, you've picked the one modern dynamic environment which lacks most of the features lisper is talking about. That's not an argument against having those features. I think it's mostly an observation that this particular environment picked a different attribute (runtime security) to optimize for above all else. You'll note that JS-style security is fundamentally incompatible with many of the concepts in OP's original question. > I think you'll find that pretty much any environment allows this. Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs. Can you give an example? I've never heard of a C++ system that let you redefine classes at runtime without debug symbols. I can't imagine how it would work. How would you even inspect the classes at runtime to find out what you're redefining?