14 ms·

This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fas

by Exuma 7y ago

This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fast performance wise?

TurboHaskal 7y ago
There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity. Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.
  - methehack 7y ago
    Assuming you don't want emacs, so... If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.
    - methehack 7y ago
      Oh I guess my "assuming you don't want emacs, so..." was interpreted as a ding against emacs so I was downvoted... I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there. All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.
      - jonathankoren 7y ago
        FTR the reason why i don't use emacs is because it frustratingly has too many degrees of freedom, and thus is perpetually misconfigured, and I find it has atrocious UX. The last emacs I used with any regularity was XEmacs.
  - Jach 7y ago
    Are you using the right slime plugin? I haven't tried it yet (I'm happy with vim+slimv) but I saw a thread on the CL subreddit last month that stated "atom-slime is now replaced by Slima which is more complete". I've given Allegro a spin, and LispWorks too. I liked Allegro's UI better, but both just give off the "We designed our UI in the 90s, updated to the WinXP plastic chrome at one point in the early 2000s, and haven't touched it since!" vibe. It's just not very pleasant, especially with a big screen... I use Eclipse at work for my Java day job (IntelliJ is also an option but Eclipse is fine for me) and it makes me sad that its UX with all its clunkiness and compromises to be a mega plugin-extendable open source IDE still feels better than the IDEs that just need to support Lisp. If either Lisp company would offer a subscription license model similar to IntelliJ's along with even vague promises of modernizing the UX (like it's not a good sign when your product landing page literally still has a Windows XP screenshot http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html ) I'd start paying immediately, but I suspect most of their revenue is from the core Lisp image, their side products (I've heard AllegroGraph is amazing if you need that sort of thing), and various customer support contracts for not just the products but bespoke extensions / feature requests. That is to say, very little from the editor itself. Yeah you can always use their Lisp with emacs/slime but then part of the point is lost. ;)
    - TurboHaskal 7y ago
      I personally cannot stand Allegro's IDE, but LispWorks looks like your regular native application on macOS and Windows. And since v7 it looks good on hi-res screens (sadly, the free version is stuck on the former major release, which is bad marketing IMHO). It might not look as trendy as IntelliJ or VScode, but compared to stuff like Eclipse I'd say it does quite well. Here's a screenshot on macOS https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png browsing some example code. EDIT: A similar screenshot on Windows https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png
    - lispm 7y ago
      > Windows XP screenshot There are a bunch of oldish things in it, but the backend is relatively native - so the application has a newer look on new systems. They also improve the CAPI GUI layer with releases with new features. http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/RNIG/html/readme.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/RNIG/html/readme... http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme-131.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme... There are a bunch of new IDE features, like visual profiler output, Code Coverage tool, support for remote debugging, ... You'd have to read the release notes to find all that stuff. All in all it is a very feature-rich system...
  - prometheus76 7y ago
    I am definitely a Lisp noob, but portacle has been a pretty great "intro to lisp programming" environment. (I'm in a Windows environment, as the context to this comment.) Portacle is basically emacs with SLIME and a Common Lisp REPL integrated. What I just wrote might actually be nonsense because, again, I am noob af.
throwanem 7y ago
Dealing with a bug in the language implementation is almost always a miserable experience, and all implementations have them; SBCL isn't unique or even unusual in this respect. Where it, and other Common Lisp implementations with similarly mature tooling, are indeed unusual and exceptional is in the unparalleled flexibility they offer to inspect, introspect, and instrument running code in real time, without having to so much as restart the system under inspection, and also without the constant headaches of something like gdb and its often flaky translation of byte slaw into symbolic structures. There's a goodly number of reasons not to choose Common Lisp for production, not least of which is that engineers skilled and familiar with the language can be hard to find. Debuggability, though, is not among them.
mnemonicsloth 7y ago
The long and the short of it is that lisp, for all its faults, is superior to commonly used programming languages in most cases. It's almost as fast and way, way more expressive than C, C++ and Java. It's still more expressive and 100x faster than Perl, Python, Ruby. It's the expressivity that hooks you in, in my experience. Once you've gotten used to programming with macros (code rewriting programs), the thought of programming without them seems almost as bad as programming without functions.
bjoli 7y ago
Because languages with the same speed are generally a lot less flexible. If you have access to allegro CL or LispWorks and you and your team know CL you must have some very good reasons not to use it. SBCL (the implementation they use) was(is?) known to have a pretty bad GC situation.

by Exuma 7y ago

This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fast performance wise?

TurboHaskal 7y ago

There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity. Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)

jonathankoren 7y ago
Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.
- methehack 7y ago
  Assuming you don't want emacs, so... If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.
  - methehack 7y ago
    Oh I guess my "assuming you don't want emacs, so..." was interpreted as a ding against emacs so I was downvoted... I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there. All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.
    - jonathankoren 7y ago
      FTR the reason why i don't use emacs is because it frustratingly has too many degrees of freedom, and thus is perpetually misconfigured, and I find it has atrocious UX. The last emacs I used with any regularity was XEmacs.
- Jach 7y ago
  Are you using the right slime plugin? I haven't tried it yet (I'm happy with vim+slimv) but I saw a thread on the CL subreddit last month that stated "atom-slime is now replaced by Slima which is more complete". I've given Allegro a spin, and LispWorks too. I liked Allegro's UI better, but both just give off the "We designed our UI in the 90s, updated to the WinXP plastic chrome at one point in the early 2000s, and haven't touched it since!" vibe. It's just not very pleasant, especially with a big screen... I use Eclipse at work for my Java day job (IntelliJ is also an option but Eclipse is fine for me) and it makes me sad that its UX with all its clunkiness and compromises to be a mega plugin-extendable open source IDE still feels better than the IDEs that just need to support Lisp. If either Lisp company would offer a subscription license model similar to IntelliJ's along with even vague promises of modernizing the UX (like it's not a good sign when your product landing page literally still has a Windows XP screenshot http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html ) I'd start paying immediately, but I suspect most of their revenue is from the core Lisp image, their side products (I've heard AllegroGraph is amazing if you need that sort of thing), and various customer support contracts for not just the products but bespoke extensions / feature requests. That is to say, very little from the editor itself. Yeah you can always use their Lisp with emacs/slime but then part of the point is lost. ;)
  - TurboHaskal 7y ago
    I personally cannot stand Allegro's IDE, but LispWorks looks like your regular native application on macOS and Windows. And since v7 it looks good on hi-res screens (sadly, the free version is stuck on the former major release, which is bad marketing IMHO). It might not look as trendy as IntelliJ or VScode, but compared to stuff like Eclipse I'd say it does quite well. Here's a screenshot on macOS https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png browsing some example code. EDIT: A similar screenshot on Windows https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png
  - lispm 7y ago
    > Windows XP screenshot There are a bunch of oldish things in it, but the backend is relatively native - so the application has a newer look on new systems. They also improve the CAPI GUI layer with releases with new features. http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/RNIG/html/readme.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/RNIG/html/readme... http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme-131.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme... There are a bunch of new IDE features, like visual profiler output, Code Coverage tool, support for remote debugging, ... You'd have to read the release notes to find all that stuff. All in all it is a very feature-rich system...
- prometheus76 7y ago
  I am definitely a Lisp noob, but portacle has been a pretty great "intro to lisp programming" environment. (I'm in a Windows environment, as the context to this comment.) Portacle is basically emacs with SLIME and a Common Lisp REPL integrated. What I just wrote might actually be nonsense because, again, I am noob af.

throwanem 7y ago

Dealing with a bug in the language implementation is almost always a miserable experience, and all implementations have them; SBCL isn't unique or even unusual in this respect. Where it, and other Common Lisp implementations with similarly mature tooling, are indeed unusual and exceptional is in the unparalleled flexibility they offer to inspect, introspect, and instrument running code in real time, without having to so much as restart the system under inspection, and also without the constant headaches of something like gdb and its often flaky translation of byte slaw into symbolic structures. There's a goodly number of reasons not to choose Common Lisp for production, not least of which is that engineers skilled and familiar with the language can be hard to find. Debuggability, though, is not among them.

mnemonicsloth 7y ago

The long and the short of it is that lisp, for all its faults, is superior to commonly used programming languages in most cases. It's almost as fast and way, way more expressive than C, C++ and Java. It's still more expressive and 100x faster than Perl, Python, Ruby. It's the expressivity that hooks you in, in my experience. Once you've gotten used to programming with macros (code rewriting programs), the thought of programming without them seems almost as bad as programming without functions.

bjoli 7y ago

Because languages with the same speed are generally a lot less flexible. If you have access to allegro CL or LispWorks and you and your team know CL you must have some very good reasons not to use it. SBCL (the implementation they use) was(is?) known to have a pretty bad GC situation.