4 ms·

More powerful language -> shorter, DRYer code -> less maintenance. (Plus a few other reasons. See PG's essays, PG's Lisp books, and SICP if you don't know the

by xlnt 18y ago

More powerful language -> shorter, DRYer code -> less maintenance. (Plus a few other reasons. See PG's essays, PG's Lisp books, and SICP if you don't know the other reasons.) If you don't believe this, don't use Lisp. The guy writing the article does seem to believe it. He likes and respects Lisp. So he ought to analyze in the way I said.

sunkencity 18y ago
So it's lack of faith that is his problem? But yeah I agree with you, the more powerful the language, the shorter code you can write. Though python is a pretty powerful language in it's own right, it's got a repl console and sweet little list comprehensions and more, so is the difference really that great between python and lisp? Python is not assembler after all. To know that I suppose I should have to learn lisp myself, which I haven't had the time to do yet. Surrounded by java zealots at work as I am though, and that clojure seems to be the best working non-statically typed language on the JVM I just might. The issue with utf-8 seems to be solved by now from reading the comments around here. But there are always problems working with utf-8 with libraries written by people that have never needed to work on non-ascii text, the code has simply not been tested thoroughly on the problem of working with utf-8 text so while it might be production quality regarding to ASCII there are weird bugs that pop out of the woodwork when working with musical notes. On a related note: I've written a few programs in ruby where I've really run into trouble not having decent unicode support in the language. With iconv you can easily make it work if you are working with characters that map to an 8-bit character set. But if you are working with characters that map to several european languages at once, and need the euro symbol, you're in the cold. You can have utf-8 strings in ruby yes, but if you pry them apart, or make changes to them, they loose their utf-8:ness and look like shit. This is an issue that should really be solved at language level, if you don't want to have roughly similar the same abstraction level dealing with strings as you have in C. I love ruby, but I hate working with utf-8 strings in it just now.
- xlnt 18y ago
  > unicode is an issue that should really be solved at language level with lisp, you don't need anything to be built in "at the language level" because you can modify the language much better than with python or ruby. many "built-in" lisp features, that would be language-level in other languages, are just built-in macros, and you could have written them yourself exactly the same. for example, loops are done this way.
  - gaius 18y ago
    What you say is true, of course, but at the same time it's true of any Turing-complete languages, and therefore, meaningless. I'm not a bad engineer because I don't have time to start every project from the bare metal. Runtime and libraries make a huge difference in the real world. Sure I'd love to spend the time really diving deep and making LISP into the perfect DSL for me, but the truth is, I can just use Python and go.
    - xlnt 18y ago
      it's not the same in any turing-complete language. lisp makes adding new "language level features" easy, and python makes it hard. i'm not saying you should always use lisp for everything. but for this particular issue lisp has a major advantage.

by xlnt 18y ago

sunkencity 18y ago

So it's lack of faith that is his problem? But yeah I agree with you, the more powerful the language, the shorter code you can write. Though python is a pretty powerful language in it's own right, it's got a repl console and sweet little list comprehensions and more, so is the difference really that great between python and lisp? Python is not assembler after all. To know that I suppose I should have to learn lisp myself, which I haven't had the time to do yet. Surrounded by java zealots at work as I am though, and that clojure seems to be the best working non-statically typed language on the JVM I just might. The issue with utf-8 seems to be solved by now from reading the comments around here. But there are always problems working with utf-8 with libraries written by people that have never needed to work on non-ascii text, the code has simply not been tested thoroughly on the problem of working with utf-8 text so while it might be production quality regarding to ASCII there are weird bugs that pop out of the woodwork when working with musical notes. On a related note: I've written a few programs in ruby where I've really run into trouble not having decent unicode support in the language. With iconv you can easily make it work if you are working with characters that map to an 8-bit character set. But if you are working with characters that map to several european languages at once, and need the euro symbol, you're in the cold. You can have utf-8 strings in ruby yes, but if you pry them apart, or make changes to them, they loose their utf-8:ness and look like shit. This is an issue that should really be solved at language level, if you don't want to have roughly similar the same abstraction level dealing with strings as you have in C. I love ruby, but I hate working with utf-8 strings in it just now.

xlnt 18y ago
> unicode is an issue that should really be solved at language level with lisp, you don't need anything to be built in "at the language level" because you can modify the language much better than with python or ruby. many "built-in" lisp features, that would be language-level in other languages, are just built-in macros, and you could have written them yourself exactly the same. for example, loops are done this way.
- gaius 18y ago
  What you say is true, of course, but at the same time it's true of any Turing-complete languages, and therefore, meaningless. I'm not a bad engineer because I don't have time to start every project from the bare metal. Runtime and libraries make a huge difference in the real world. Sure I'd love to spend the time really diving deep and making LISP into the perfect DSL for me, but the truth is, I can just use Python and go.
  - xlnt 18y ago
    it's not the same in any turing-complete language. lisp makes adding new "language level features" easy, and python makes it hard. i'm not saying you should always use lisp for everything. but for this particular issue lisp has a major advantage.