5 ms·

Why is that good news? Are you still waiting for Lisp to get popular and to make all these problems go away?

by cstejerean 18y ago

pg 18y ago
I think the point is that the problem isn't in the language core, but in more superficial things like libraries.
- gaius 18y ago
  Well, libraries may be superficial, but I few times now I've started in LISP, needed something that I just can't find, can't build myself (I'm not that good) and switched to Python because I needed to get stuff done. I am slowly but surely assembling all the LISP pieces I need (CLSQL being the latest piece of the puzzle). But the truth is you can install Python, be doing something useful within a day and writing production code within a week. LISP requires much more upfront investment before you (well, me) can be productive in it. That's not a criticism of LISP itself, but the lack of a "batteries included" distribution. If only ActiveState made an ActiveLISP...
  - gruseom 18y ago
    What have you needed that you couldn't find?
    - gaius 18y ago
      OK, here's one example. I have an app that receives email, processes it, and sends it back. I need to get all its attachments, do work on them and build a new message. In Python parsing an email is: import email msg = email.message_from_string(sys.stdin.read()) How easy is that? The subject is msg["Subject"]. Iterating over the MIME parts is 2 lines of code. I could build all the scaffolding very quickly, and concentrate on the problems I needed to solve. Maybe this is just as easy in LISP - if you already know where to get all the bits, and I don't, and I'm not good enough to write a production-grade RFC822 handler in a day. I like LISP a lot and am trying to use it where I can, but at the end of the day, I have to get stuff out the door as quickly as I can...
      - icey 18y ago
        I think more than anything else, this is probably the largest problem with Lisp adoption. Maybe Clojure will have better luck in this space because of its ability to drop into the JVM to get libraries.
        herdrick 18y ago
        Java's email library sucks. You need to sumbit to the JavaMail way of looking at email to do the simplest thing with it. First you need to understand that JavaMail is 'cross-platform' in the sense that it's for any hypothetical messaging system, not just email. So it has layers and layers of lame abstractions. Lots of configuration needed to do the simplest things. That's one of the worst examples, but my overall feeling is that dynamic languages on the JVM aren't worth it. You're probably better off with an independent language environment.
        gruseom 18y ago
        this is probably the largest problem with Lisp adoption Sometimes it's not clear if that's really the problem, or if it's more the perception (and the fact that the perception gets repeated a lot) that's the problem. Hence my question earlier in the thread.
        pg 18y ago
        I suspect the biggest problem with Lisp adoption may just be that people find s-expressions terrifyingly incomprehensible. Though there's always some reason the median programmer doesn't want to use Lisp, the reason changes. In the 1980s people said Lisp was too slow. Now it's libraries. This kind of variety is the signature of reasons people offer when they're avoiding something out of fear or laziness.
        gruseom 18y ago
        I started writing something similar: I think the real reason most people don't like Lisp is because most people don't like to think in s-expressions. (Then I thought nah, nobody's going to like that, so I deleted it and just left the bit about libraries - foolish move!) It's not only fear or laziness; I know two very good programmers who have tried Lisp and don't like it. Interestingly, both are Smalltalkers, though one was of the original generation that migrated to Java. I wonder if it's that some people like thinking in trees and some don't. Human language has barely any nesting. Putting one parenthetical phrase inside another is already rare and that's just two levels. Parenthetical nesting is so difficult for humans to process that there's even a well-known hypnotic induction based on it (that essentially creates a stack overflow in a person's brain). One of the guys I'm talking about has a programming style that's markedly linear (though not procedural). He likes chaining expressions together almost like noun phrases in English. For example, where in Lisp you'd write (min y (max x 0)) he might write: x.atLeast(0).atMost(y) It's a trivial example, but enough to imagine more complex ones. The difference is dramatic if you think of a tree with many levels and the comparable unwound form. Of course, not all trees can be unwound in this way. The converse is true, though: all chains of this form could be converted to s-expressions, so it's easy to imagine embedding this style into Lisp with a macro. That's the sort of thing that gets talked about naively, but never catches on. I think it would be a losing proposition. You'd lose Lisp's regularity, which is one of its greatest advantages. And the resulting programs would still have plenty of s-expressions, so you'd end up driving away the same group of people after all.

Why is that good news? Are you still waiting for Lisp to get popular and to make all these problems go away?

pg 18y ago

I think the point is that the problem isn't in the language core, but in more superficial things like libraries.

gaius 18y ago
Well, libraries may be superficial, but I few times now I've started in LISP, needed something that I just can't find, can't build myself (I'm not that good) and switched to Python because I needed to get stuff done. I am slowly but surely assembling all the LISP pieces I need (CLSQL being the latest piece of the puzzle). But the truth is you can install Python, be doing something useful within a day and writing production code within a week. LISP requires much more upfront investment before you (well, me) can be productive in it. That's not a criticism of LISP itself, but the lack of a "batteries included" distribution. If only ActiveState made an ActiveLISP...
- gruseom 18y ago
  What have you needed that you couldn't find?
  - gaius 18y ago
    OK, here's one example. I have an app that receives email, processes it, and sends it back. I need to get all its attachments, do work on them and build a new message. In Python parsing an email is: import email msg = email.message_from_string(sys.stdin.read()) How easy is that? The subject is msg["Subject"]. Iterating over the MIME parts is 2 lines of code. I could build all the scaffolding very quickly, and concentrate on the problems I needed to solve. Maybe this is just as easy in LISP - if you already know where to get all the bits, and I don't, and I'm not good enough to write a production-grade RFC822 handler in a day. I like LISP a lot and am trying to use it where I can, but at the end of the day, I have to get stuff out the door as quickly as I can...
    - icey 18y ago
      I think more than anything else, this is probably the largest problem with Lisp adoption. Maybe Clojure will have better luck in this space because of its ability to drop into the JVM to get libraries.
      - herdrick 18y ago
        Java's email library sucks. You need to sumbit to the JavaMail way of looking at email to do the simplest thing with it. First you need to understand that JavaMail is 'cross-platform' in the sense that it's for any hypothetical messaging system, not just email. So it has layers and layers of lame abstractions. Lots of configuration needed to do the simplest things. That's one of the worst examples, but my overall feeling is that dynamic languages on the JVM aren't worth it. You're probably better off with an independent language environment.
      - gruseom 18y ago
        this is probably the largest problem with Lisp adoption Sometimes it's not clear if that's really the problem, or if it's more the perception (and the fact that the perception gets repeated a lot) that's the problem. Hence my question earlier in the thread.
      - pg 18y ago
        I suspect the biggest problem with Lisp adoption may just be that people find s-expressions terrifyingly incomprehensible. Though there's always some reason the median programmer doesn't want to use Lisp, the reason changes. In the 1980s people said Lisp was too slow. Now it's libraries. This kind of variety is the signature of reasons people offer when they're avoiding something out of fear or laziness.
        gruseom 18y ago
        I started writing something similar: I think the real reason most people don't like Lisp is because most people don't like to think in s-expressions. (Then I thought nah, nobody's going to like that, so I deleted it and just left the bit about libraries - foolish move!) It's not only fear or laziness; I know two very good programmers who have tried Lisp and don't like it. Interestingly, both are Smalltalkers, though one was of the original generation that migrated to Java. I wonder if it's that some people like thinking in trees and some don't. Human language has barely any nesting. Putting one parenthetical phrase inside another is already rare and that's just two levels. Parenthetical nesting is so difficult for humans to process that there's even a well-known hypnotic induction based on it (that essentially creates a stack overflow in a person's brain). One of the guys I'm talking about has a programming style that's markedly linear (though not procedural). He likes chaining expressions together almost like noun phrases in English. For example, where in Lisp you'd write (min y (max x 0)) he might write: x.atLeast(0).atMost(y) It's a trivial example, but enough to imagine more complex ones. The difference is dramatic if you think of a tree with many levels and the comparable unwound form. Of course, not all trees can be unwound in this way. The converse is true, though: all chains of this form could be converted to s-expressions, so it's easy to imagine embedding this style into Lisp with a macro. That's the sort of thing that gets talked about naively, but never catches on. I think it would be a losing proposition. You'd lose Lisp's regularity, which is one of its greatest advantages. And the resulting programs would still have plenty of s-expressions, so you'd end up driving away the same group of people after all.