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Re: "Lisp isn't more productive just because..." Whether Lisp or functional programming is "more productive" in general or just in the hands of a few is a cont

by tabtab 7y ago

Re: "Lisp isn't more productive just because..." Whether Lisp or functional programming is "more productive" in general or just in the hands of a few is a controversial topic. Example debates: https://wiki.c2.com/?IfFooIsSoGreatHowComeYouAreNotRich https://wiki.c2.com/?IfFooIsSoGreatHowComeYouAreNotRich https://wiki.c2.com/?GreatLispWar https://wiki.c2.com/?GreatLispWar I personally find functional harder to debug and haven't got past that bottleneck yet. Yes, maybe I'm "doing it wrong", but can't find "right". Somebody else once told me, "functional makes it easier to express what you want but imperative (traditional programming) makes it easier to figure out what's actually happening". That rings very very true for me. In terms of productivity, it looks the second is trumping the first. In another forum, the "solution" was "just don't make bugs". Doh! Even if true for an individual, it may not scale to a bigger team.

zmmmmm 7y ago
One of the reasons I hover in the space of semi-functonal languages like Groovy and Scala. Because as much as I love concisely expressing a piece of complex logic as a composition of reduces, folds, maps etc., being able to easily and naturally break out of that to execute a piece of imperative code in the middle of it is still regularly a life saver to me and often an order of magnitude clearer than the pure functional solution to a reader.
- tabtab 7y ago
  I lot of the time it seems programmers are just avoiding using SQL to do query-centric processing (slicing and dicing lists). Aside from performance problems, another downside is that one reinvents query language idioms in each programming language. It increases the learning curve and is anti-standardization.
ken 7y ago
Do you mean the first question literally? My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity. Figuratively, in the sense of "if Lisp allows you to be so concise, why aren't your programs small?", I can report that in every case where I ported a program to or from Lisp, the Lisp version was significantly shorter than the non-Lisp implementation. So I'd say, "it is". As for whether I'm just an amazing programmer, I don't think so. (I don't think I've ever been accused of that!) I know a company here that uses Clojure and most new hires have to learn it on the job. From what I've heard, nobody has a problem with it. I find C (and imperative languages in general) harder to write and debug. Am I "doing it wrong"? I've found C hard to work with since around 1990 when I first tried to learn it.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Re: "My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity." I'm thinking more from the owner's perspective. If they hired a bunch of Lisp programmers, then they'd produce more software with fewer programmers (if the productivity claims were correct). They'd then get rich and expand, and other companies would take notice and copy. Re: "I know a company here that uses Clojure and most new hires have to learn it on the job. From what I've heard, nobody has a problem with it." There seem to be niches were it works out well, but it has stayed niches since the invention of Lisp. After 50+ years of not catching on in the mainstream, you have to wonder about real-world market fit. Re: "I find C (and imperative languages in general) harder to write and debug." C is a relatively low-level language, mostly designed for hardware speed instead of programmer speed. Thus, it's not the best specimen of imperative languages to compare with. But in general such seems to be subjective: people give widely varying anecdotes. Those who like Lisp dialects gravitate toward them and those who don't go elsewhere.

by tabtab 7y ago

zmmmmm 7y ago

One of the reasons I hover in the space of semi-functonal languages like Groovy and Scala. Because as much as I love concisely expressing a piece of complex logic as a composition of reduces, folds, maps etc., being able to easily and naturally break out of that to execute a piece of imperative code in the middle of it is still regularly a life saver to me and often an order of magnitude clearer than the pure functional solution to a reader.

tabtab 7y ago
I lot of the time it seems programmers are just avoiding using SQL to do query-centric processing (slicing and dicing lists). Aside from performance problems, another downside is that one reinvents query language idioms in each programming language. It increases the learning curve and is anti-standardization.

ken 7y ago

Do you mean the first question literally? My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity. Figuratively, in the sense of "if Lisp allows you to be so concise, why aren't your programs small?", I can report that in every case where I ported a program to or from Lisp, the Lisp version was significantly shorter than the non-Lisp implementation. So I'd say, "it is". As for whether I'm just an amazing programmer, I don't think so. (I don't think I've ever been accused of that!) I know a company here that uses Clojure and most new hires have to learn it on the job. From what I've heard, nobody has a problem with it. I find C (and imperative languages in general) harder to write and debug. Am I "doing it wrong"? I've found C hard to work with since around 1990 when I first tried to learn it.

tabtab 7y ago
Re: "My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity." I'm thinking more from the owner's perspective. If they hired a bunch of Lisp programmers, then they'd produce more software with fewer programmers (if the productivity claims were correct). They'd then get rich and expand, and other companies would take notice and copy. Re: "I know a company here that uses Clojure and most new hires have to learn it on the job. From what I've heard, nobody has a problem with it." There seem to be niches were it works out well, but it has stayed niches since the invention of Lisp. After 50+ years of not catching on in the mainstream, you have to wonder about real-world market fit. Re: "I find C (and imperative languages in general) harder to write and debug." C is a relatively low-level language, mostly designed for hardware speed instead of programmer speed. Thus, it's not the best specimen of imperative languages to compare with. But in general such seems to be subjective: people give widely varying anecdotes. Those who like Lisp dialects gravitate toward them and those who don't go elsewhere.