47 ms·

Ask HN: Production Lisp in 2020?

222 points by dhab 6y ago

I have gone through initial chapters of "Practical Common Lisp"[1] and "Loving Common Lisp" [2], and have a bit of intuition on lisp, and the power of macros. Haven't done any projects yet, but was also researching on real issues faced by adopting lisp, and ran into articles about abandoning lisp [3], adopting lisp [4],[5]. Could not find anything more recent; but what they mention in these articles - even the ones that are adopting lisp talk about issues like: * poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked * poor community coordination * Dependency management limitations with quicklisp And some specific red flags like: * poor support for json[6] * poor support for async * have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak [3] * hack to tune GC [5] If you are using lisp in production for non-trivial cases, do these issues still exist? is there a way you can quantify effort is resolving them, and if yes, what is it? and, finally, if you had to re-do your project, would you chose lisp or something else? [1]: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ [2]: https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp/read#quicklisp https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp/read#quicklisp [3]: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-turtl-switched-from-lisp-to-js/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-turtl-switched-from-... [4]: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-deftask-chose-common-lisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-deftask-chose-common... [5]: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-production/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p... [6]: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/#s48-st-json https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/#s4...

CyberFonic 6y ago
Your questions are well answered by Paul Graham in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html. There are many Common Lisp and Scheme environments. Many have excellent JIT compilers. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses. So it really depends on your specific use case as to which environment has the best support. For me the biggest factor is that Lisp is very productive for use by a small and competent team. In those situations they tend to create a DSL and evolve the system. PG's essay describes the reason Lisp fails many projects in the section "The Blub Paradox".
- dhab 6y ago
  Unfortunately, PG's post is orthogonal to what I am trying to find. My concerns are mostly around community and operational aspects AFTER adopting lisp
- d0m 6y ago
  I'm a big PG fan but to be honest, him building viaweb in Lisp is 99% because: "Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp.", and not because of a competitive advantage in the language. There are so many things that can go wrong in a startup, it's not the time to pick a stack or database you know nothing about.
juskrey 6y ago
Clojure is a production Lisp in 2020
- _ix 6y ago
  Our health benefits startup has been using Clojure in production for some time. Efforts are ongoing to migrate the last bits from other JVM languages to Clojure, but ClojureScript is already ubiquitous.
thom 6y ago
Perhaps you didn't mention it for a reason, but I am sure I won't be the only one to bring up Clojure in this thread, and others will argue for and against more eloquently. Obviously it lacks much of what makes people love Common Lisp, but it's more Lisp than not Lisp, and specifically addresses all of your points via the JVM and its ecosystem.
mapcars 6y ago
I made a few hobby projects in different Lisps, but in the end for my field (REST backends) I would chose Erlang and today I also started looking towards Kotlin. Lisp's macros while being powerful are still creating a lot of trouble in terms of understanding the system, working with other people and finding support online. Also I personally didn't meet many developers who have solid understanding of FP, not even talking about macros - they are simply too complicated and don't allow human scaling.
- fastball 6y ago
  Why Kotlin and not Elixir + Pheonix for web backend?
  - nurettin 6y ago
    kotlin makes spring boot much more usable
  - mapcars 6y ago
    I have some experience with Elixir, you can think of it as nicer Erlang. Kotlin is interesting because it gives you access to Java (Android & Desktop) world and is closer to functional languages while still being widely usable.
varjag 6y ago
We use CL for production (embedded/distributed system). CCL and Lispworks on low end ARM32. We do use JSON but mainly for the product's Websocket API towards higher level SCADA system. As we have control over both ends there isn't much trouble really. The project has soft realtime component also implemented with Lisp, and at least Lispworks exposes a substantial degree of control over GC. We however didn't need to tune anything thus far. The system has perhaps a dozen direct dependencies to the libraries, luckily few of them posed any challenges in use.
- spauldo 6y ago
  If you don't mind my asking, what company is this? I'm a Lisp hobbyist working for a SCADA integrator, and while I'm not in the job market right now I might be in a few years.
  - varjag 6y ago
    It's norphonic.com, based in Norway. The product is not on the webpage yet though.
    - spauldo 6y ago
      Ah, pity. I'd love to visit Norway sometime (I've heard great things), but my family won't move across the ocean. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
synthc 6y ago
Clojure has a good ecosystem and you can fall back to Java's ecosystem if needed. It has excellent support for json, and acceptable async support (I use manifold + aleph, but there are other options). It runs on the JVM which has world class GC.
- ssivark 6y ago
  I want to understand the complementary picture. Assuming Clojure as a good default, what would be some specific kinds of tasks/problems for which one might wish to avoid Clojure? And what alternatives would you recommend, for those cases? (be it another lisp, or otherwise)
  - piranha 6y ago
    I wouldn't use Clojure if fast startup time is important for you. So it's okay for servers, but not okay for (in general case) for command line tools. With GraalVM this is changed a bit, but then compilation of non-trivial projects with GraalVM is also non-trivial. If you need a low memory consumption then Clojure is also not a great choice. We've built an ecommerce site on Clojure though and it's been great. :)
dutchblacksmith 6y ago
I use lispworks, the CAPI works well on allmost all platforms. They know what they are doing. Books: common lisp recipes, PAIP, ANSI COMMON LISP. The few libraries you need are very good.And you need Quicklisp. I stopped using C, C++, pascal, fortran, javascript. Altough they all are just fine. You still have to learn the craft of programming. Just go for it.
- nicklaf 6y ago
  I'm going to second the recommendation of Common Lisp Recipes. The others too, of course (especially PAIP).
gjvc 6y ago
This may not squarely answer your question, but when I was investigating this for a production project, the following tools seemed to be both essential and well-supported. SBCL, SLIME, SLY, ASDF, quicklisp, and ultralisp Other tools and solutions are available, but familiarity with this seemed to be what was required for comfortable use.
Chris2048 6y ago
I'm not a lisp programmer, but I have used emacs in the past. For people w/ lisp dev XP, can I ask this: Is the ".emacs/config bankruptcy" issue a general problem? Specifically, when you use so many powerful devices, macros etc; but with little predictable code structure, then further development that sits well with existing code becomes pretty difficult.
- ssivark 6y ago
  I’m not an experienced lisp programmer, but Emacs bankruptcy is imho avoidable. You must understand that people often configure their editors by the worst of Stackoverflow-driven coding... copy-pasting random snippets till things work, and accumulating cruft over time. Also, Emacs lisp is not particularly great (compared to other lisps) and Emacs configuration is typically done through a bunch of exposed global variables. YMMV. A production codebase hopefully merits very different attitudes :-)
  - mijoharas 6y ago
    Also, frameworks seek to claw back some structure from the morasses. It's kinda fine if every library you use is _slightly_ different if you can have a unified interface for how to use them (spacemacs layers system for me). It is annoying figuring out which invocation of variables sets the tab-width for _this_ new language though... Also, most libraries in the emacs ecosystem have become more standardised in their interfaces, so things aren't too different nowadays.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    I think this is the problem. copy-paste a powerful snippet anywhere, no need to put it in a particular place or integrate it into an existing structure. But the global variable thing is interesting; Does regular lisp differ a lot wrt snippets having broad, global effects?
dhab 6y ago
Thank you for your responses. I was interested in learning about these concerns for Common Lisp only, and not the other dialects including scheme, clojure, racket ...
jasode 6y ago
I think Reddit's decision to move from Common Lisp to Python is interesting and their reasoning (ecosystem) is still valid 15 years later. The historical timeline is especially interesting because Reddit's cofounders Steve Huffman & Aaron Swartz were alumni of Paul Graham's first YC batch and PG is the author of the well-known Lisp essay "Beating the Averages": - 2001-04 Paul Graham : Lisp essay "Beating the Averages" [1] - 2005-07-26 Paul Graham : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLVd9lJyk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLV... - 2005-12-05 Steve Huffman : https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/ https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/ - 2005-12-06 Aaron Schwartz : http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit The takeaway from the Reddit case study is this: Yes Lisp macros and language malleability gives it superpowers that other languages don't have (the "Blub Paradox") -- but other languages also have other superpowers (ecosystem/libraries) that can cancel out the power of Lisp macros. You have to analyze your personal project to predict if the ecosystem matters more than Lisp's elegant syntax powers. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- nojito 6y ago
  Or the simpler reason is that they just knew LISP better than other languages and chose to use it. Once they needed to grow by adding developers, they decided to rewrite into a language that other people already knew. The only "Super Power" is the complete understanding of what your endusers want so that you can grow.
  - cornishpixels 6y ago
    Knowledgeable developers are part of every language's ecosystem.
    - nojito 6y ago
      Yes but ease of attracting developers is harder in some languages versus others. No need to include the "knowledgeable" modifier.
jmercouris 6y ago
I'm using Lisp in production, our browser and all of our infrastructure is in Lisp https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next. TO address some of your points; poor ecosystem of libraries: many great libraries, some incomplete. you must not be afraid to look at the source code to understand and edit poor community coordination: true, there are few large scale community lisp projects. be the change you want to see dependency limitations with quicklisp: like what? quicklisp works great. if you are talking about loading several versions of the same library at the same time in a single image, this is being researched and developed poor support for json: no, there is good support have to restart the server every 20 days: not familiar, I have had lisp servers running for years now hack to tune GC: no if I had to redo my project would I choose Lisp? I would choose lisp, yes. there is no more powerful language than this, and believe me, I have tried many
- dhab 6y ago
  The post [1] (though old) - hints at no good libs for json (mentions a workaround for one he picks) > For me, the most important quality I need in a JSON library is an unambiguous, one-to-one mapping of types. For example: some libraries will deserialize JSON arrays as Lisp lists, and JSON true/false as t/nil. But this means [] and false both deserialize to nil, so you can't reliably round trip anything! Although this post is from 2018, wondering if it has improved since then. [1] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/#s48-st-json https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/#s4...
  - aerique 6y ago
    I've been using `jsown` for all my Common Lisp JSON needs. There are more JSON libraries and I think JSON support for Common Lisp is good, not perfect, but no worse than most other popular languages. With regards to Steve's issues: ask yourself whether they apply to you.
  - junke 6y ago
    This just works: USER> (yason:parse "{\"null\" : null, \"false\" : false, \"empty\": []}" :object-as :plist :json-arrays-as-vectors t :json-booleans-as-symbols t :json-nulls-as-keyword t) ("null" :NULL "false" YASON:FALSE "empty" #()) Null is mapped to the :null keyword, false to a symbol named false in the yason package, and the empty vector to an empty lisp vector (in Lisp #(1 2 3) denotes a vector, whereas (1 2 3) is a linked-list). All threes can be distguinshed from the others. All those options defaults to special (dynamically scoped) variables, so you don't have to pass them everytime. Encoding prints to the standard output (you can redirect it to an http stream, if you want), so you don't see double-quotes being escaped, but the string is equivalent (modulo spaces): USER> (yason:encode-plist *) {"null":null,"false":false,"empty":[]} The defaults in Yason just returns list for vectors, and map both null and false to nil, but this is not a problem: if you expect your field "items" to be a vector, then nil will denote the empty list, if you expect another field "enable-debug" to be a boolean, nil be good enough too. But in cases where you need to handle them differently, the library can help you distinguish among all kinds of value. See https://phmarek.github.io/yason/ https://phmarek.github.io/yason/
cbuskilla 6y ago
try hy - https://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/ https://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/ Most of my production code is python, but I also wanted to create a dsl so I used hy. You get to enjoy both worlds
- sgt 6y ago
  I tried to get hy but I just got confused.
tsss 6y ago
I really hope that Lisp will get a comeback in the space that is now occupied by XML and YAML. It's always the same story: Narrow minded engineers chose YAML (formerly XML) as the trendy simple configuration language and it works fine for a while. 3 years later they inevitably hit the ceiling with YAML and either start badly implementing new language features on top of YAML (see Gitlab CI's `when`, `only`, `except`, etc. syntax) that are never flexible enough or write hugely complicated templating tools (see Kustomize and Helm for K8S) for things that would amount to a simple if-expression in Lisp. This is the use case where Lisp can really shine. Configuration is almost always untyped and doesn't start out with a library ecosystem. Most of the time you just need a way to write a simple nestable DSL that is human readable. There's probably no language that makes this simpler than Lisp: Any college freshman could write their own interpreter. But it is also extremely flexible if it turns out that you need more power than YAML offers.
- fsloth 6y ago
  I don't think XML has been 'trendy' for ages :) XML is totally fine for storing structured dumb data. Don't program in XML. I would not be so bullish about implementing your own interpreter - as the best obvious choice every time. Numbers especially are hard to get correct unless you know what you are doing.
  - justinmeiners 6y ago
    I don't think this user is advocating using home grown interpreters. Rather it's easy to understand how they work completely. The point is complex configurations tend to grow into a poor programming language. They would be far better as a lisp DSL.
  - peppery-idiot 6y ago
    Pretty much everything in CI is driven by YAML or JSON or YAML string as a value in a JSON property and they uniformly suck. So I think GP is correct.
- ipnon 6y ago
  It's amazing how people who call themselves professional software engineers can be unaware of the fact they are accidentally writing a (horrible) programming language. People with computer science degrees look confounded when you even let the letters "DSL" pass your lips.
akssri 6y ago
ITA software's account of using CL may also be of interest, http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html
jjuliano 6y ago
The problem with malleability of programming languages, is there is no upper limitation of how malleable it can be. I experienced this in both Clojure and Ruby as well. The fact that developers can spend countless of precious time, cycling through a loop of malleability, reforming an already functional product in production. It costs precious time and money, it is expensive. And more importantly, it is non-stop. Other programming languages like Go are very conservative with feature changes, and imposes hard limitations by choice, the team/company behind it thinks the same way, that a cycle of O(n) is destructive. And nowadays, you can't expect a developer to stay on a company for so long, so a sureball tooling to hit it hard, and precise, with less time and tinkering around is much needed than ever. On the future of programming languages, we will see languages being used not because it is malleable, but because it is sure, precise and right for the job.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  I tried Go and didn't like its opinionated nature. As a beginner, I disliked, - I have to use every variable I declare, otherwise it won't compile (b/c golang authors decided this produces better code) - Official docs confusingly suggest I structure imported files with the root as github.com/ (b/c golang assumes all code will be open sourced) - I can only import one file per folder - There is no built in map or reduce function. You're expected to use for loops everywhere because it is more explicit Once I discovered the last point I noped out.
  - jjuliano 6y ago
    > - I have to use every variable I declare, otherwise it won't compile (b/c golang authors decided this produces better code) > - There is no built in map or reduce function. You're expected to use for loops everywhere because it is more explicit Go is an imperative language, where no implicit magic happens on the background, like auto creation of resources on runtime, every sequence needs to be manually defined by the programmer. "With imperative code, you’re telling your program how to do something. And with declarative code, you’re telling your program what you want to do. - Tyler Mcginnis, React Fundamentals", depends on the programmer, but I like to be in control.
mikelevins 6y ago
Yep, I've used Common Lisp in production. Several times. I'm in the middle of writing a new app with Lispworks right now. Common Lisp is generally the first thing I think of for any new work I undertake. There are exceptions, but usually my first choice is Common Lisp. It has been for a little over thirty years. I've often worked in other languages--usually because someone wants to pay me to do so. I usually pick Common Lisp, though, when the choice of tools is up to me, unless some specific requirement dictates otherwise. The objections you list might be an issue to some extent, but not much of one. Certainly not enough to discourage me from using Common Lisp in a pretty wide variety of projects. I've used it for native desktop apps, for web apps, for system programming, for text editors, for interpreters and compilers. When I worked on an experimental OS for Apple, the compiler and runtime system I used were built in Common Lisp. I'll use something else when someone pays me enough to do it. I'll use something else because it's clearly the best fit for some specific set of requirements. I'll use it when there isn't a suitable Common Lisp implementation for what I want to do. I'll even use something else just because I want to get to know it better. I've taken various detours along the way into learning and using various other languages. I like several of them quite a bit. I just don't like them as much as Common Lisp. The pleasure I take in my work is a significant factor in my productivity. Choosing tools that offer me less joy is a cost I prefer not to bear without good reason. That cost often exceeds the advantage I might realize from using some other language. Not always; but often. There was once a language I liked even better than Common Lisp. Apple initially called it 'Ralph'. It evolved into Dylan, which, in its present form, I don't like as much as Common Lisp. If I or someone else invested the considerable time and effort needed to write a modern version of Ralph, then I might choose it over Common Lisp. For now, though, I'll stick with the old favorite. It continues to deliver the goods.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I am also working on an app using LispWorks [1]. If you want, please contact me and we can jump on a call and share experiences. Off topic, but many years ago I had lunch with Larry Tesler (John Koza was also there) and Larry knew of my CL book from the 1980s and pitched me to rewrite it in Dylan. That might have changed my career trajectory. [1] http://knowledgegraphnavigator.com/ http://knowledgegraphnavigator.com/
Grue3 6y ago
Not really production because the traffic is low, but I run http://ichi.moe http://ichi.moe on SBCL (Hunchentoot web server) and I never had to restart it because of memory leak or a crash. I usually hot-swap the updates and the same server process stays up for months. It also heavily uses JSON and XML and the libraries for them (jsown and cxml) are perfectly adequate.
thanatropism 6y ago
I'm using Hy[0] for some API-accessible "glue code" (basically doing high level stuff with scipy.sparse and friends as building blocks). [0] hylang.org
pjmlp 6y ago
Usually using Lisp in production means making use of either LispWorks or Allegro Common Lisp, and not the FOSS offerings.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Why?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Because they are the surviving commercial vendors from the Lisp Machine days, with a complete graphical developer experience and optimizing compilers. If you want a full blown Common Lisp experience, with a GUI based REPL, GUI debugger with edit-and-continue, and all the nice stuff you see from Xerox PARC, TI and Genera demos, they are the ones to get.
    - dreamcompiler 6y ago
      CCL has its own IDE which I find preferable to those of LW and Franz. It doesn't have the GUI construction set that MCL had, and unfortunately the IDE is Mac-only, but I find it much more productive than Emacs/Slime. SBCL has an exceptionally good optimizing compiler now. It probably generates faster code than LW and Franz in most cases.
      - mark_l_watson 6y ago
        The CCL IDE is indeed good. I played around with CCL’s Cocoa bindings a lot earlier this year, then decided to, as another commentator said, throw some money at the problem and bought a LispWorks license to get CAPI.
    - gnufx 6y ago
      If I'm programming in Lisp, I actually want the same venerable Lisp-based IDE that I use for other languages.
- rjsw 6y ago
dan-robertson 6y ago
I’ve not used lisp in production. But I sometimes wish I did. In particular, whenever there’s an issue with a production process (think a batch job rather than some kind of online processing), I wish I could attach a debugger, inspect some variables, and invoke a restart. I don’t know how of any language that makes it more convenient to do that sort of issue-resolution. I don’t really care about libraries. I think generally it’s not very hard to write an ffi binding to a C library and most of the time you don’t need a library anyway. Most of the time you can just write your own library from scratch as you probably only need a few functions. But maybe this is more a statement of the sort of programs I work on and if you worked on different systems you would want to use lots of external libraries that you don’t control. I think the biggest issue with CL is how tightly attached it is to an outdated standard. It makes it harder to have things like good Unix support if your interface is through pathnames and streams. Other thing which may be annoying about CL are the lack of a good way to consistently go from source code to a binary and that compiler optimisations can be unpredictable
- justinmeiners 6y ago
  > consistently go from source code to a binary Can you talk more about this?
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Let’s say I have a big repo full of lisp. I want a program that uses some subset of this lisp. Similarly to if I had a big repo full of C programs and libraries and I wanted to build one of those programs (statically linking all the libraries it used). In CL, it is annoying and tricky to go from those files to an executable I can deploy. Typically you’d write some script to (use ASDF to) compile/load your various files and then dump the image specifying a binary. It’s a bit messy and not very portable.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      I will never understand how people have such a rosy view of C development. Is it just that today people think there is only GNU make, and only GCC or clang? Autotools used m4 because it was the most portable Unix tool, not because it's a good language to write your build scripts in...
souenzzo 6y ago
I delived a service in 2019 that was written 100% written in clojure. ReactNative app + SPA Web app + Server all sharing the same code. The developer experience was great. I get subsecond hot-reload on all plataforms (app emulator/app on-device/web/server). The same UI components was shared between ReactNative and ReactDOM. All App issues are reproducible in Web, then I fix in web and I'm sure that App is working. Even SSR was possible, with some tweaks.
- deathtrader666 6y ago
  What framework and libraries did you use?
- virtualwhys 6y ago
  Got a public repo to share that would show how you pulled this off? Barring that, as a sibling comment asks, what specific framework and/or libraries did you use to achieve the holy grail of sharing-all-the-things? (thought ReactNative required implementing separate UI for iOS and Android). Sub second hot reload sounds amazing, btw.
  - Jonovono 6y ago
    Not sure this will help: ClojureScript RN app: (I think has desktop and all that as well) https://github.com/status-im/status-react https://github.com/status-im/status-react
- shoulderfake 6y ago
  Would love to see a breakdown of your setup for this :)
  - eckesicle 6y ago
    Not OP but to achieve this in clojure you could use something like: For builds and dependency management: Leiningen, boot or deps.edn For the front-end (clojurescript): Shadow-cljs + reagent For the backend (clojure): Nrepl and nrepl.cmdline, Ring, jetty + compojure for a REST API Frontend and backend can share code with .cljc files that work on all clojure dialects. https://clojure.org/guides/reader_conditionals https://clojure.org/guides/reader_conditionals Both nrepl and shadow-cljs support code reloading through the REPL connection. You can compile to a jar file and deploy that, build a docker image, or compile to a native executable with graalvm, or deploy on Aws lambda with Cljs+Lambada. Lots of options.
jonwalch 6y ago
My very early stage startup, whiplash.gg (tune in today at 2pm PT to see us in action) uses Clojure on the backend. Ladder Insurance is a full stack Clojure shop and Watchful has a bunch of Clojure in prod too.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
First, thanks for linking my Living Common Lisp book. Common Lisp is my preferred language, but only for projects where I need/want an environment that support rapid experimentation of new ideas. If I know how to implement something and I want to deploy at scale, then I might not choose Common Lisp. I am a happy LispWorks customer but I also use SBCL (efficient code, easy to package standalone apps) and Clozure Common Lisp (fast compiler for development).
sulami 6y ago
CircleCI is mostly Clojure, and some Go. The only problems we are seeing is the significant startup time cost (hence the Go bits, where it matters). Memory usage also isn't always great, but that's more a JVM problem, as it's not releasing reclaimed memory as quickly as you'd like it to. Fine on servers, annoying on a 16GB laptop. The Common Lisp problems you outlined don't really apply to Clojure, it's a modern lanaguage and has been stable and versatile for us.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Is the new frontend also written in ClojureScript? Seems you've closed sourced the frontend (old source is here https://github.com/circleci/frontend https://github.com/circleci/frontend) but you used to use CLJS, but maybe new one is written in something else?
  - sulami 6y ago
    I'm on the backend, but all I've seen of the new frontend is TypeScript. There has been a decision to switch languages for reasons that someone else can probably explain better than I could, a lot of us lurk here.
- kudokatz 6y ago
  Having used Clojure in production many years ago, I was very satisfied. And solid interop with existing Java libraries really brings in a whole ecosystem if needed. Persistent data structures are really game-changing.
lukego 6y ago
I'm starting a new project in Lisp in 2020. That's rolling my own CAD tools for learning hardware development. Lisp makes sense because it's a comfortable environment for interacting with my data. I'll be running the Lisp code "offline" so I'm not worried about runtime aspects like GC pauses and most of my I/O will be generating data for external tools (e.g. KiCad) in their own esoteric formats. Coming back to Lisp it's nice to see that all my favourite software is still available and working fine, and there seem to be more active open source Lisp developers than ever. (Far fewer than Javascript, for example, but that's not my yardstick.)
ashtonkem 6y ago
I used to work in Common Lisp (SBCL). The ecosystem problem meant something different to me than most. Sure, when new tech came out (Kafka to pick a random example) there wouldn’t be an open source library ready for me. But I had stable infrastructure so I didn’t really care much about that. The ecosystem problem for me meant that if something went wrong I was on my own. It’s a pretty unfortunate feeling to search for a bug and find nothing on Stack Overflow.
- kazinator 6y ago
  > It’s a pretty unfortunate feeling to search for a bug and find nothing on Stack Overflow. Par for the course in embedded. So isn't going to tell you why the kernel driver for the ABC123 chip is locking up on the XYZ15 eval board from Such-and-Such vendor. You debug it yourself, whipping out JTAG debuggers and oscilloscopes, if necessary. Because I work in embedded, I don't understand the whole ecosystem fuss. I mean, joy of joys, you have the darned source to almost everything nowadays. That makes everything so easy, that all else is a footnote.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I'm coming at this from the opposite side. Currently, it feels like most of my programming skills are really just Googling skills and remembering what a particular error message means. The market emphasizes this kind of programming by combining existing libraries and hoping things work, so it's really hard for me to break away from doing that and start to learn the way that stuff works internally. I think that this was the reason that they stopped teaching SICP in Scheme [0]. I can read source code (I do some security research for fun) and use a debugger, but I still feel like I'm programming by poking. What would you recommend to younger programmers to get out of this rut? 0: In this talk at the NYC Lisp meetup, Gerry Sussman was asked why MIT stopped teaching the legendary 6.001 course, which was based on Sussman and Abelson’s classic text The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Sussman’s answer was that: (1) he and Hal Abelson got tired of teaching it (having done it since the 1980s). So in 1997, they walked into the department head’s office and said: “We quit. Figure out what to do.” And more importantly, (2) that they felt that the SICP curriculum no longer prepared engineers for what engineering is like today. Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems. Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking.
atgreen 6y ago
Low traffic, but https://rl.gl https://rl.gl is running production on SBCL (on kubernetes). Common Lisp is a joy.
_bxg1 6y ago
Clojure direct tackles most of these problems and it seems to me (subjectively) that it's one of the most widely-used Lisps for actual production systems.
TurboHaskal 6y ago
Can't speak for SBCL (I use it exclusively for development and haven't deployed anything non trivial and user facing with it) but I have used Clozure CL (CCL) successfully to develop back end services without horror stories regarding the GC. If you end up needing huge heap sizes, in theory with ABCL you get access to state of the art GC algorithm implementations and (IMHO) a much nicer, less dogmatic language than Clojure. I recently switched to LispWorks after struggling a bit with CCL's Cocoa bridge and I wish I had done that sooner. A much younger, idealistic me would scream at the thought of it but sometimes you just need to throw some money at a problem. CAPI is really a killer feature.
mgdev 6y ago
Oracle used Lisp [1] in the UIs for their gen-2 cloud product. They eventually hit a wall hiring the kinds of people Oracle wanted to hire (few of whom wanted to learn an esoteric language), and made the tragic decision to move new development over to TypeScript (and port many of the key existing surfaces for ongoing maintainability). Mixed results on that. Many who were around for both the old and new code bases report that, while the old one took more effort to pick up, it was easier to trace data flow and is less prone to creating weird state bugs. [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-cloud-choosing-lisp-because-nobody-told-me-i-mason-browne/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-cloud-choosing-lisp-...
jetti 6y ago
We use Clojure + ClojureScript for just about everything where I work. There are a few older applications that are in Javascript with NodeJS and we have one that is C# and .NET but the rest of the company pretty much runs on Clojure. As mentioned elsewhere, Clojure doesn't really have any of the issues that you mention.
lisper 6y ago
> poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked Definitely no longer an issue for Common Lisp. Quicklisp is da bomb. > Dependency management limitations with quicklisp Never had any issues. It Just Works for me. > have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak [3] You can get memory leaks in any language. You're much less likely to have a leak in a GCd language than a non-GCd language. But seriously, if you can't easily restart your server whenever it's needed, you have bigger problems. > hack to tune GC [5] I've run CL in production for many different applications. I've never had to tune a GC.
reikonomusha 6y ago
Rigetti Computing is a company that builds quantum computers. We have used Common Lisp in production at Rigetti Computing for 4 years both in cloud deployment as well as for a downloadable SDK. Common Lisp is used to build what is currently the best free optimizing compiler for quantum computing [1, 2] as well as one of the most flexible quantum computer simulators [3]. They’re both open source, so you can actually see for yourself how we version, deploy as binaries, and deploy in Docker containers. > If you are using lisp in production for non-trivial cases, do these issues still exist? Before getting into the specifics, any large, non-trivial product that customers use will need tweaking. Especially languages that have runtimes, including languages like C. This is usually a result of leaky abstractions that just have to be dealt with in The Real World (TM). > * poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked You have libraries for most things you need. Some are lacking, like in scientific computing. But all your usual stuff to glue things together is there and works. Some people confuse “half-baked” with “no commits for 5 years”. Lisp libraries are older than many in vogue languages, and Lisp doesn’t change, so “5 years no commits” shouldn’t be worrisome. At Rigetti, the biggest weight we had to pull that we wouldn’t have needed to do in, say, Python, is bind to a bunch of FORTRAN code, specifically LAPACK. That was a pain because you need to do FFI with complex double floats. * poor community coordination The community all agrees on one thing: Lisp is standardized. Lisp lacks a sort of “centralized community” like Go or Clojure. I like to think that Common Lisp is more “democratic”. We have a “constitution” (the Common Lisp standard) that we all agree on and we all make our own contributions atop that. With that said, #lisp on Freenode is attentive. SBCL, for example, responds to bug reports almost immediately. Several library ecosystems are kept up to date, etc. > * Dependency management limitations with quicklisp With Quicklisp, I personally realized a lot of other dependency management solutions are overblown and don’t actually solve problems. Maybe QL gets away with it because the ecosystem is smaller than others. Xach, the creator of QL, does a lot of community diligence for free to ensure things work. For production code, I’ve had 0 issues. > * poor support for json We use YASON [4] and it works fine. > * poor support for async This is true now but wasn’t true years ago. Lisp implementers have not been interested in implementing a runtime supporting async programming. Little in the Common Lisp language itself prohibits it. Before the world of threads and SMP, Lisp implementers did implement async runtimes. Why aren’t Lisp implementers interested in async? I’m not sure. Maybe they see it as a passing fad? > * have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak Memory leaks can happen but they’re usually the programmer’s fault for not understanding symbol interning, weak pointers, or finalizers. Writing long-running applications does require know-how. > * hack to tune GC I don’t consider it hacking. In SBCL we tune the GC to our application. This seems reasonable; different programs have different allocation patterns. But you wouldn’t need to do this out of the box. > is there a way you can quantify effort is resolving them, and if yes, what is it? Big applications that are customer products require care and feeding. The benefits of writing in Lisp in the first place largely outweigh some of the extra work needed to productionize it. I will say that writing production Common Lisp code is greatly benefited by having at least one experienced Lisper on the team. If a team would, for some reason, write an application in Lisp but not really have a good understanding of the language, then productionizing and hardening will be difficult. > and, finally, if you had to re-do your project, would you chose lisp or something else? Common Lisp allows something that never existed before (a completely automatic, optimizing quantum compiler) to exist. If Lisp weren’t there, that wouldn’t exist. My parting advice is this: The biggest difficulty in writing an application is to actually write it. It takes a lot of hard work to get requirements, listen to feedback, articulate a direction, etc. In Common Lisp, SBCL or LispWorks or whatever else, dumping an executable is so easy and you can have a deployable “production app” in 5 minutes. So the good news is that you won’t be held up trying to figure out how to dockerize your Python app. I definitely agree that before embarking, doing an objective and relevant comparative analysis would be good (we did this at Rigetti), but ultimately you just need to sit down and write. Almost every programming problem is solvable these days with enough glue and elbow grease. I wouldn’t be too worried. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13961 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13961 [2] https://github.com/rigetti/quilc https://github.com/rigetti/quilc [3] https://github.com/rigetti/qvm https://github.com/rigetti/qvm [4] https://github.com/phmarek/yason https://github.com/phmarek/yason
MageSlayer 6y ago
KDB+ is Lisp under the hood. Please count as highly successful Lisp used in production.
deckeraa 6y ago
I use Clojure and ClojureScript in production. The developer experience is a real pleasure: there is good library support, libraries are typically easy to use, and you can always interop with the underlying JVM/js if the need arises. Clojure also has the core.async library. This can be used along with Reagent to build React-based apps; core.async allows you to do what Redux does but in fewer lines of code. https://github.com/deckeraa/OpenStainer https://github.com/deckeraa/OpenStainer is an example of building apps this way.
frompdx 6y ago
> * poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked Specific to common lisp: I don't find the ecosystem to be poor but I notice that many are turned off by the look and feel of library landing pages which do feel dated. In same cases I have felt the libraries lacked documentation, like Caveman2, but in the end I found there was little to document after reading some of the source code. Specific to Clojure: I don't think this criticism applies to Clojure at all and the popular Clojure libraries usually come with great documentation as well. IMO, JavaScript is also littered with mounds of crappy half baked libraries as well but people still use it for server side stuff even though they have a choice to use something else. > * poor community coordination Which lisp community? > * Dependency management limitations with quicklisp What limitations? Also, if you don't like quicklisp or common lisp in general, I think Clojure really nails dependency management and find it very easy to use. > * poor support for json[6] Specific to CL: I can understand this because there are a number of libraries and no obvious winner. JSON isn't the only data serialization format though. Guess it depends on what you need. https://www.cliki.net/serialization https://www.cliki.net/serialization > * poor support for async Specific to Common Lisp: There is cl-libuv: https://quickref.common-lisp.net/cl-libuv.html https://quickref.common-lisp.net/cl-libuv.html and wookie. Specific to Clojure: core.async is great and if you don't like it you are also free to use node.js as your runtime with clojurescript. > * have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak [3] If I had a dollar for every node.js production app that suffered this very same problem I could probably retire today. I thought it was interesting that the author of that article says the service was re-written in node.js given node.js is hardly immune to these sorts of problems. IMO, async is just a pain to work with and these types of issues are a manifestation of that. > * hack to tune GC [5] Users in JVM land also report having to resort to tuning the GC or selecting the optimal GC for their use case. I don't think this is a reason to shy away from lisp. > If you are using lisp in production for non-trivial cases, do these issues still exist? I have not personally encountered these issues in Clojure or CL. That is not to say they do not exist. But they also exist in plenty of other popular platforms to varying degrees. See my responses above for examples. > and, finally, if you had to re-do your project, would you chose lisp or something else? I would still choose lisp, either Clojure or Common Lisp. I generally favor Clojure to CL.
foobar-xk 6y ago
Apple has been using Clojure in production for years, and is hiring: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200000986/apple-media-products-software-engineer-core-services https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200000986/apple-media-p... Excerpt from the description: "These are the people who power the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books. And they do it on a massive scale, meeting Apple’s high expectations with high performance to deliver a huge variety of entertainment in over 35 languages to more than 150 countries."
tomck 6y ago
> have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak Hmm this seems like something super specific to their async setup, rather than 'common lisp leaks memory'
err4nt 6y ago
I use CCL and a set of helper functions (that take continuations) so I can quickly and easily generate bits and pieces of HTML from my shell. I have previously written the same helpers in JS, Python, and Ruby, but there was a certain elegance about the LISP version and that's the only version I use and maintain anymore. I doubt anybody knows how often I'm using LISP with this little tool because they only see the resulting HTML, but it's been a big help to me.
zubairq 6y ago
Yazz Pilot (https://github.com/zubairq/pilot https://github.com/zubairq/pilot) was originally written in Lisp (Clojure) but we switched to Javascript, simply because it was easier to get third party developers on board with Javascript compared to Lisp
vindarel 6y ago
I am running a web app in production, with live reloads, no issues so far. > * poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked I actually had the choice for my libraries: DB interface, email sender, HTML template, data structure helpers… these ones with good documentation. I have observed and explored the ecosystem for the last 3 years and I still find hidden gems. There are way more libraries than we can see at a quick glance. We do a selection on https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl > * poor community coordination It looks like the oldest ones don't coordinate much and the youngers do (and push the established players, such as the CL foundation). > * poor support for async Maybe not for a full async runtime (cf Turtl feedback), but there is a good choice for all sort of async stuff (bordeaux-threads, lparallel, lfarm, channel, SBCL built-ins etc)
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kmclean 6y ago
Have you considered lisp dialects? I've been working with Clojure/Clojurescript for a while and it addresses most of those concerns. It's been a real pleasure to work with. - There are lots of high quality libraries, but you also have access to the entire Java and/or Javascript ecosystem with very easy interop - Not too sure what you mean by "community coordination", but I've found the clojure community to be exceptionally friendly, welcoming, and responsive. The core team is active and I've even had some questions answered directly by them in slack! - There is some tooling built and maintained by the core team that makes managing dependencies painless - There's a library (transit) that's widely used and well suited for marshalling data in and out of a clojure app. There's a library that's part of the core which implements the CSP (communicating sequential processes) concurrency model, similar to Go. It works in both Clojure and Clojurescript and is a very sensible way to manage async operations in a system. - GC is managed by the JVM (for clojure), which is state of the art
flavio81 6y ago
I've used Lisp for a production system I delivered one year ago. I used CCL as an implementation and had a lot of success. Here i'll cover your points: > poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked I'd say the ecosystem is high-quality. There are relatively few libraries (around 2000+) compared to other ecosystem, but on the other hand most of them are either interesting, or unique (wouldn't exist in languages that lack certain features), or really well-written. Or many of those qualities at the same time. In the absolute sense, there are enough libraries, IMO. If you need something that isn't available, you have at least three options: 1. Bind to a C library; for this, Common Lisp has many facilities/libs for this, some of them make this task rather easy. 2. Same as (1) but Use ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp) for integrating a C program with a Lisp program as a whole, easily calling C from Lisp and Lisp from C, etc. 3. Use the java ecosystem and use the Armed Bear Common Lisp (ABCL) implementation. This implementation makes calling java libs a piece of cake, basically you call a java method with just one line of code. Or instance a class with just one line of code, etc. Really easy. > poor community coordination That's a bit meaningless. There are really good quality books and resources, i think that's what counts. > Dependency management limitations with quicklisp Quite the opposite. Quicklisp is awesome, better than PIP or NPM. It "just works". > And some specific red flags like: > poor support for json[6] The opposite, many libs for JSON. The one I use, I like a lot. > poor support for async What does this mean? You can use cl-async, but i wonder what would be the benefit when in CL you have actual threads and great libraries for concurrency like lparallel (which introduces parallel processing constructs) or chanL (which gives you an easy to use channel implementation). Cl-async allows you to leverage the whole power of libuv (just like Node does), but why? I'd rather use threads. > have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak [3] Never heard about such things. Perhaps you are confusing the "condition - restarts system" (which is the Lisp exception handling system) with having to restart something? > hack to tune GC [5] The URL you cite says "We had to tune the generation sizes". Any respecting developer who wants to release a high performance production quality service NEEDS to tune the GC. Tune the GC is not a "hack", is just configuration parameters. Ask any Java developer who has had to "tune" the JVM for best performance. By the way, everybody raves about Golang but it has a GC system that is comparatively outdated to the ones in most Lisp implementations (or the JVM). For example CCL has a very good generational garbage collection.
Random_ernest 6y ago
I just would like to add to all the great comments, that clojure also has access to the python ecosystem via libpython clj.
jmorrison 6y ago
I am using CL in pre-production to avail myself of its ability to compile & load at runtime. I haven't used Lisp in production in a while (dating back to Zetalisp!), and the decades of perspective lead me to some surprising conclusions. I have encountered neither ecosystem issues (due to quicklisp) nor community issues (due to "addition by subtraction" in the Lisp online community). However, I have encountered plenty of issues due to dependency-hell issues in the non-CL software I'm using: Python 2 vs 3 vs Python package incompatibilities; Python 2 vs 3 Ansible/Vagrant container/VM/distro incompatibilities; node.js vs npm vs inter-node-package version incompatibilities; etc. CL has been gloriously stable, and given me substantially less heartburn and fewer headaches.

pjc50 6y ago

> Blub Paradox") -- but other languages also have other superpowers (ecosystem/libraries) Indeed. The "blub paradox" is profoundly arrogant - it presumes not only that people are too stupid to see the advantages of Lisp, but that Lisp advocates are smart enough to know that other languages have nothing unique to offer that Lisp doesn't.

snazz 6y ago
I think that Beating the Averages demonstrated that Lisp was PG's Blub, and maybe he wasn't using a language with strong static typing or logic programming or something like that for the same reasons that Java programmers wouldn't choose Lisp. I don't think that the fundamental flaw with that essay is the arrogance so much as the assumption that "language power" lies on a continuum in the first place.
- nojito 6y ago
  There was nothing special about the language chosen for viaweb. It was more the ability to understand what their endusers wanted better than their competitors.
  - snazz 6y ago
    If their competitors were writing their applications in C++ or Perl, it probably would have made a noticeable difference to their iteration speed. Writing a web application in C++ (especially in 1995) would not have been too efficient. I'm sure that they had a good understanding of their customers, but the language had to have made a difference as well. These days, we're writing web apps in languages like JavaScript and Ruby, not C++, so the difference would be a lot less significant.
    - nojito 6y ago
      Knowledge of the customer and programming ability is the most important driver of success. The idea that LISP was a secret sauce for viaweb does not hold up under scrutiny. If you have access to lexisnexis to lookup news articles from the era, it’s easy to see that.
    - oalae5niMiel7qu 6y ago
      Google is known to write a lot of their web apps in Java, which is very similar to C++.
- bluefox 6y ago
  Please reconsider your assumptions. PG has written two Lisp books in the nineties, one of them containing a Prolog interpreter. In fact, many Lisp programs utilize some form of logic programming. With regards to "strong static typing", types are but one way to think about things. Since Lisp affords powerful ways to shape the language, there is a culture of implementing and thinking about various paradigms, typing included. For example, the first Haskell implementation was written in Lisp, and there are other explorations of that particular paradigm. All programmers are blub programmers to some extent, but Lisp has the tools and the culture to fight it.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I apologize that my tone came across as dismissive. Chapter 24 of my paper copy of On Lisp does contain a "sketch of [Prolog's] implementation". I can certainly see the value in Lisp and the culture of bottom-up programming (there's a reason I own a physical copy of the book). I shouldn't have brought up logic and statically-typed programming as specific examples; my point was more that it's misguided to consider the "power continuum" as one-dimensional, where languages lower on the continuum are "dumb" and languages higher on the continuum are "weird". As you said, a language with good types is not necessarily more or less powerful than a highly dynamic language.
neutronicus 6y ago
PG calls it a Paradox because no one (not even the Lisper) can know whether their language is Blub. You are right, though, that the Lisp community read the essay and internalized that all other languages are Blub. In my opinion this led them to collectively dismiss, for far too long, Dictionary Literals in every dynamic language which has eaten Lisp's lunch in the marketplace in the last two decades. Objections were raised ("you need homoiconicity for macros!") and everyone assumed they were valid and stuck with Common Lisp's woeful hash table interface and the loop macro keywords, insisting all the while "oh, that's a DSL, you could implement that with Macros"[0]. And then Clojure implemented Map literals and - what do you know - Clojure still has Lisp Macros! [0] Efforts in this direction thankfully forthcoming: https://github.com/inaimathi/clj https://github.com/inaimathi/clj
- metroholografix 6y ago
  This is all surface, little substance. Map literals are 20 lines of Common Lisp [1], via the programmable in CL reader (that Clojure doesn't have). Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" is a lot more relevant about "Lisp in the marketplace" than anything you've mentioned here. [1] https://gist.github.com/rmoritz/1044553/b2d2d8e4b933cb0f6c3fb5ff3f9bcfae6be7ce47 https://gist.github.com/rmoritz/1044553/b2d2d8e4b933cb0f6c3f...
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Unfortunately: - that code doesn't provide printing for hash tables. Oops! - breaks tooling: - doesn't provide editing or syntax highlighting support. - confuses any tool that reads all of the files of a project using the Lisp reader. - it gratuitously introduces a vector syntax that is unnecessary since #(1 2 3) is perfectly fine and standard across more than one Lisp dialect. - hard-codes the #'equal equality - doesn't play with the newer ways of registering Lisp read syntaxes, like https://github.com/melisgl/named-readtables https://github.com/melisgl/named-readtables
- flavio81 6y ago
  > and stuck with Common Lisp's woeful hash table interface and the loop macro keywords You are not stuck with anything in Common Lisp. Instead of loop you have lots of options, from the built-in constructs (do, dolist, map...) to very powerful libraries like SERIES and ITERATE. You are not stuck with the default hash table interface either. Many libraries for data structure are available, you just pick the one that suits you best. >And then Clojure implemented Map literals and - what do you know - Clojure still has Lisp Macros! Most of those Clojure features are already available in CL through the use of libraries. Even the ability to easily call Java libraries, by using the Armed Bear Common Lisp implementation.

dang 6y ago

I never know about this, and it turns out there have been quite a few rich comments about it over the years—all, unless I've missed one, written by you. Here's a link if anyone wants to look back: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Amikelevins%20ralph%20-ellison&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

mikelevins 6y ago
Thanks; I looked back myself. Boy, I like to talk about Ralph, huh? To be expected, I suppose. It really was my favorite working language ever.
- dang 6y ago
  Please keep talking! Your comments are superb.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    Yeah this is cool. I did not know live coding was a thing. I'd like to see a video of that to compare with autobuild workflows that watch files for modification times.
    - mikelevins 6y ago
      There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Finally, here are a few images from about eighteen years ago, also from Rainer. They show various views of the Macintosh Common Lisp and SK8 environments. It's not an experienced user showing you around, but at least you can get some idea what the environments looked like: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000028.html http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000028.html

gnufx 6y ago
I don't remember ever hearing of Ralph when Dylan appeared, though that was long ago. Was it talked about externally?
- mikelevins 6y ago
  The name "Ralph" wasn't really secret anymore once Dylan went public, but there also wasn't any particular reason to talk about it. The name of the language was Dylan at that point. Later, as Dylan evolved away from its roots, it made sense to resurrect the old code name to distinguish the Lisp that we used to write a Newton OS from the later non-Lisp that it gradually evolved into. People did know about it, though. One of the links in a sibling comment is to turbolent's little Lisp that compiles to Javascript, named Ralph in homage to the language I used every day back in the early nineties.
7thaccount 6y ago
Hmmmm...PharoSmalltalk, 8th (same rough family as Factor), Mathematica, Dyalog APL, J, K...lots of tools that are fully interactive in their bones.
- metroholografix 6y ago
  I wouldn't characterize Pharo/Mathematica/Dyalog APL as newly emergent, they've been around for a long time. I can't say anything about J and K since I've never used them but my superficial impression is that they are focused on a specific niche, not as general purpose as most Lisps. They've also been around for a long time. 8th I have actually looked at and it's both _not_ particularly interactive (certainly nowhere near as interactive as Factor) and has a very strange license [1] to boot which makes it a total nop for me. It has been criticized before [2]. [1] https://8th-dev.com/com-license.html https://8th-dev.com/com-license.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15672361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15672361
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    New is pretty relative, but yeah they've definitely been around for a while. I'd say the array languages (APL/J/K) can be used in far more areas than most people think, but I understand your point and am on the fence myself. What is wrong with 8th's license? It is basically a Forth, so extremely interactive...mostly just messing with a stack...not sure about metaprogramming. I think a production license costs you $200 as a one time fee and you have to pay no royalties or anything for apps (better than many tools out there). Upgrading to a later version comes at a discount too. Most of the runtime is proprietary/closed-source if that is what you were saying (def understandable if you had a problem with that). Also, being a 1-developer project, progress is rapid, but I'd be worried about what happens if the maintainer wins the lottery.
    - metroholografix 6y ago
      The second link I included goes over some of the issues but regarding interactivity, just look at the videos its author produced to show it off. He's writing code in either VIM or the shell. That's a long way from Factor's image-based interactivity and a long long way from Smalltalk and Lisp Machine-paradigm Lisps. Any language with a REPL can be described as "interactive" but that's not what having a strong focus on interactive development means. As Mikel Evins wrote, it's really about the entirety of a language being geared around interactive development.
      - mikelevins 6y ago
        It's "mikel evins". I can't blame you for parsing it the other way; it's a more likely spelling. You can blame my eccentric father for the odd spelling of my first name, but he inherited the surname fair and square. It's pronounced exactly the same way as "Michael Evans."
        metroholografix 6y ago
        I'm always grateful when the map-territory distinction comes along and slaps me in the face. It's a signal that I should re-calibrate. It's been a while, thanks for making it happen!
      - 7thaccount 6y ago
        I actually take that as a positive item. He's able to effectively write code using just the terminal and vim. It doesn't get simpler than that. I really hate having to use something like Visual Studio or even VSCode. They're bloated and use a ton of resources. Playing around in Pharo is fun for a bit, but same problem. I 100% agree that it seems like you can't unwind the stack the same way you can in Common Lisp or Smalltalk though.
        metroholografix 6y ago
        Pharo is moving down strange pathways and some questionable recent implementation choices made me lose my faith (for now). Squeak has always been and remains my Smalltalk of choice, and if you can look past some -probable- superficial ugliness (e.g. Morphic) it remains relevant and extremely iconoclastic.
- mikelevins 6y ago
  Pharo and other Smalltalks are definitely interactive in the sense that I mean. Factor, too, as far as I know, and I'd add FORTH, though Lisp and Smalltalk systems tend to have more high-level conveniences than FORTH systems I've worked with. I don't know whether the others you mention are or not. A reasonable litmus test is: define some data structure and make a bunch of instances of it. Now redefine the data structure. What happens to the existing instances? Does the runtime automatically notice that the structure definition has changed and offer you a way to update the existing instance to comply with the new definitions? Another is to write a function that intentionally contains a call to some other nonexistent function, then call it. What happens when you hit the undefined function? Are you offered an interactive session that you can use to grovel around in the dynamic environment of the suspended function call? Can you see all the parameters and locals on the stack? Can you edit their values? Redefine types and pending functions? Can you supply the missing function definition, resume the suspended function call, and reasonably expect it to return a value as if the function in question had been defined all along? If the answers are yes, then the language runtime is interactive "in the bones", in the sense I mean. If not, then not so much.

Ingon 6y ago

Probably discussed before, and I’m happy to read about it if you have pointers to it, but how does livecoding work with multiple ppl/source control? Is there a persistent textual format where all changes to the image are stored? How about releases?

mikelevins 6y ago
Old-fashioned Lisp and Smalltalk systems (and some old Scheme systems) can save the live memory image to a file. You can load that file at launch time to reproduce the dynamic state of the system at the time the image was saved. You can share saved dynamic state between colleagues that way. Pretty handy, especially when you want someone to be able to debug a hard-to-reproduce bug that just showed p on your screen. We used to keep known good images to work from. Generally a pristine release image, and a reference image with current project code preloaded, and then one or more working images with programmer-specific or task-specific code loaded. I used to save a working image at the end of the day and launch it again the next morning. MCL would remember my state right down to the positions and contents of my windows, so it was a quick and easy way to drop right back into the state of mind I was in at the end of the previous day. For source code, we used revision control, exactly as you'd expect. In the Ralph days it was Apple's Projector. Nowadays most folks use git. It's not super convenient to use revision control for dumped images because they're moderately large binaries. Source-control systems are mostly not great with those. So I keep reference images around, treating them like any other valuable binary asset--the difference being that rebuilding them from scratch is pretty fast and easy with today's fast machines. My standard operating procedure is to start with a single scratch file that constructs a sketch of my naive idea of the data I'm going to be working with, load it, and start poking it to find out where I'm wrong. As I begin to know what I'm doing, exploratory expressions turn into definitions of functions and data structures. I refactor them out into proper source files and add references to them into a system loader (like everybody else, I use ASDF for that). Occasionally I might screw up the dynamic state by doing something dumb. Then I kill the session and restart it. The Lisps I use are generally back up and ready for me to continue in less than a second. When I've made enough progress to want to build a release that I can distribute to testers, I write a builder file. The exact details of that depend on which Lisp I'm using; Lispworks, SBCL, and CCL each have their own idiosyncratic ways of going about it, but a simple build is generally something like a half dozen lines, and a complex one probably isn't much more than a page or so. The builder file evolves along with the rest of the project. The same general process applies to unit and integration tests. In fact, I'm pretty much always testing--testing my thoughts and testing what I just wrote is probably the majority of my activity most days. All I have to do to create formal unit and integration tests is make a testing scaffold and then harvest expressions from my scratch files and test comments to flesh it out. When I release, I tag a commit in the source repo. I might also make a reference image to keep around locally, in case I want to test something against it or hand it to a collaborator. I work in files a lot, which is typical of Lispers. Smalltalkers are a little more oriented to living in the image. For the most part, files are a serialization format that you use to exchange code and other resources with other sites. Locally, everything lives in your image. Modern Smalltalk systems have their own built-in interfaces to revision control, either to git or, in Squeak or Pharo, to a Smalltalk-specific revision-control system called Monticello.
- psilotorp 6y ago
  (Hope this isn't too disruptive to the conversation, but I just wanted to thank you for the time you're taking in sharing these details with us. All very interesting.)
p_l 6y ago
There were tools for Smalltalk systems that did version control on the level of individual objects in networked way. Some of that drives present synchronization efforts with Git in Pharo, generally the name to search archives for is "Envy".