4 ms·

Strongly agree with that viewpoint and the central paradigm it describes, it's what's made my 15 year investment into Lisp more than worth it. It's also what ma

Strongly agree with that viewpoint and the central paradigm it describes, it's what's made my 15 year investment into Lisp more than worth it. It's also what makes every newly emergent language not measure up to Lisp: None of them focus on interactive development. In fact, the only one I'm aware of that (partly) did that was Slava Pestov's Factor but ultimately, it was more a proof-of-concept than anything that could be considered practical and is now languishing. Later, Slava went to Apple to work on Swift, which turned out to be another mediocrity, lacking any sort of originality / vision and having a firm expiration date. There used to be a time when programming languages focused primarily on end-user empowerment and paradigm-centered computing was the norm (e.g. Seymour Papert's groundbreaking research in constructionism and incremental learning / development). There is precious little left of that now.

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.

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.