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> Lisp doesn’t really have many, if at all, super weird concepts that need months of thinking about in order to understand. I mean Haskell advocates will say t

> Lisp doesn’t really have many, if at all, super weird concepts that need months of thinking about in order to understand. I mean Haskell advocates will say the same about Haskell (monads are really not that bad: I'd be surprised if someone on a team of experienced Haskell programmers would take more than a week to come up to speed on them. It's more the rich interplay of monads and other concepts that either rewards deeper study or is a dangerous rabbit hole depending on your perspective). In both cases it's a matter of how deep the rabbit hole goes in the concepts that the languages do offer and how much a given code base uses those concepts to their fullest potential. It's a double-edged sword. The same concepts that yield so many layers of power, expressiveness, and universality can yield frighteningly arcane codebases in the hands of advanced novices, those with "just enough knowledge to do harm." There's a reason the meme of Lisp programmers going through a phase where they want to "macro all the things" before calming down and using them more judiciously is a meme. Likewise a boring language like Go that purposefully puts abstraction ceilings has a double-edged sword whose edges cut the other way. An excellent team with good taste will be at home in whatever language they end up choosing, almost by definition. The opposite direction is a road much more fraught with danger.

reikonomusha 5y ago
Haskell programmers may say the same thing about Haskell, but it’s not the same thing as far as Lisp is concerned. Yes, it’s possible to concoct the weirdest stuff in Lisp, but that would probably be bad code. Some macros might take time to learn, but unlike Haskell where you need to know monads to be productive, you do not need to know how to author macros to read and write most Lisp. Languages that have these “abstraction ceilings”, as you put it, have their own danger as well—just a different danger. Namely, you’re choosing boringness of the language as a feature, in many cases requiring some multiple of additional programmers, which means some multiple of additional time spent hiring and money spent paying salaries. For some companies, money isn’t a problem, so choosing boring tech with a gazillion programmers and double-digit churn rate is just fine. Programming in Go doesn’t automatically resolve all the issues of running and maintaining a technical project. It makes one particular problem trivially solved (inconsistent code format, expressiveness going off the rails, etc.). But choices and policy around how code is contributed to, how software is documented, how architecture is developed and reviewed, how dependencies are managed and added, how code is reviewed, etc. still falls on humans to conceive and implement as agreed-upon policies. In Lisp, how code is formatted and what language features might be off-limits can also be solved by way of such policy-making. Its not theoretical either; even Google publishes a style guide on Lisp development that they follow internally, and it works fine. It’s really not as “dangerous” as everyone seems to make it out to be.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  > but unlike Haskell where you need to know monads to be productive I disagree. You don't need to author monads to be productive in Haskell (and in a production codebase rarely would, the monads you use change rarely). Having written a good of deal of Lisp going out to production in the form of Clojure and a good deal of Haskell I really think monads and macros are a rather fitting analogy here. It's really the same deal. You need to know how use monads in Haskell just as you need to know how to use macros in a Lisp. Are you going to be writing a lot of your own new ones in a pre-existing production codebase? Unlikely. Are you going to be creating a couple of them here and there in a lot of the new libraries you write? Probably. Are they both things that sound really scary to outsiders but are really quite tame if you have a team surrounding you helping you out? Yeah. > It’s really not as “dangerous” as everyone seems to make it out to be. Again I don't think it's dangerous. I just think it's a weird direction to take. There are no good languages in isolation. There are only languages that are the best fits for a given team. EDIT: > Languages that have these “abstraction ceilings”, as you put it, have their own danger as well—just a different danger. Namely, you’re choosing boringness of the language as a feature, in many cases requiring some multiple of additional programmers, which means some multiple of additional time spent hiring and money spent paying salaries. For some companies, money isn’t a problem, so choosing boring tech with a gazillion programmers and double-digit churn rate is just fine. Indeed, I'm not particular champion of Go or Java (the traditional boring languages people bring up). Their very boring-ness has its own drawbacks as you say, ones that I feel acutely whenever I've worked on teams using them. But these are a series of true trade-offs, one where different situations will call with different needs. I have met plenty of people who are extremely competent Common Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, etc. programmers who have proactively chosen to go with a "boring" language for a new team (for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because the "interesting" language has sharp edges). The team (and by extension the company) precedes and determines the language, not the other way around.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    I do agree most Haskell programmers don’t need to be authoring monads to be productive. My take was more along the lines that monads expose an interface/API to the programmer that is used pervasively in “ordinary programming”. This interface/API is defined rather abstractly and doesn’t come equipped with “obvious”, self-evident definitions. You can get pretty far in Haskell though just sort of parroting these operators for specific class instances of interest, like IO and Maybe. This is, I claim, unlike macros where you really don’t need to know about the machinery of macros (or even of their existence) to understand and use AND, OR, DOLIST, LOOP, etc. The notion of a macro doesn’t “leak” in “ordinary programming” whereas ‘>>=‘ or ‘return’ do, even if in just type errors. (Sorry for the copious scare-quotes.)

reikonomusha 5y ago

Haskell programmers may say the same thing about Haskell, but it’s not the same thing as far as Lisp is concerned. Yes, it’s possible to concoct the weirdest stuff in Lisp, but that would probably be bad code. Some macros might take time to learn, but unlike Haskell where you need to know monads to be productive, you do not need to know how to author macros to read and write most Lisp. Languages that have these “abstraction ceilings”, as you put it, have their own danger as well—just a different danger. Namely, you’re choosing boringness of the language as a feature, in many cases requiring some multiple of additional programmers, which means some multiple of additional time spent hiring and money spent paying salaries. For some companies, money isn’t a problem, so choosing boring tech with a gazillion programmers and double-digit churn rate is just fine. Programming in Go doesn’t automatically resolve all the issues of running and maintaining a technical project. It makes one particular problem trivially solved (inconsistent code format, expressiveness going off the rails, etc.). But choices and policy around how code is contributed to, how software is documented, how architecture is developed and reviewed, how dependencies are managed and added, how code is reviewed, etc. still falls on humans to conceive and implement as agreed-upon policies. In Lisp, how code is formatted and what language features might be off-limits can also be solved by way of such policy-making. Its not theoretical either; even Google publishes a style guide on Lisp development that they follow internally, and it works fine. It’s really not as “dangerous” as everyone seems to make it out to be.

dwohnitmok 5y ago
> but unlike Haskell where you need to know monads to be productive I disagree. You don't need to author monads to be productive in Haskell (and in a production codebase rarely would, the monads you use change rarely). Having written a good of deal of Lisp going out to production in the form of Clojure and a good deal of Haskell I really think monads and macros are a rather fitting analogy here. It's really the same deal. You need to know how use monads in Haskell just as you need to know how to use macros in a Lisp. Are you going to be writing a lot of your own new ones in a pre-existing production codebase? Unlikely. Are you going to be creating a couple of them here and there in a lot of the new libraries you write? Probably. Are they both things that sound really scary to outsiders but are really quite tame if you have a team surrounding you helping you out? Yeah. > It’s really not as “dangerous” as everyone seems to make it out to be. Again I don't think it's dangerous. I just think it's a weird direction to take. There are no good languages in isolation. There are only languages that are the best fits for a given team. EDIT: > Languages that have these “abstraction ceilings”, as you put it, have their own danger as well—just a different danger. Namely, you’re choosing boringness of the language as a feature, in many cases requiring some multiple of additional programmers, which means some multiple of additional time spent hiring and money spent paying salaries. For some companies, money isn’t a problem, so choosing boring tech with a gazillion programmers and double-digit churn rate is just fine. Indeed, I'm not particular champion of Go or Java (the traditional boring languages people bring up). Their very boring-ness has its own drawbacks as you say, ones that I feel acutely whenever I've worked on teams using them. But these are a series of true trade-offs, one where different situations will call with different needs. I have met plenty of people who are extremely competent Common Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, etc. programmers who have proactively chosen to go with a "boring" language for a new team (for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because the "interesting" language has sharp edges). The team (and by extension the company) precedes and determines the language, not the other way around.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  I do agree most Haskell programmers don’t need to be authoring monads to be productive. My take was more along the lines that monads expose an interface/API to the programmer that is used pervasively in “ordinary programming”. This interface/API is defined rather abstractly and doesn’t come equipped with “obvious”, self-evident definitions. You can get pretty far in Haskell though just sort of parroting these operators for specific class instances of interest, like IO and Maybe. This is, I claim, unlike macros where you really don’t need to know about the machinery of macros (or even of their existence) to understand and use AND, OR, DOLIST, LOOP, etc. The notion of a macro doesn’t “leak” in “ordinary programming” whereas ‘>>=‘ or ‘return’ do, even if in just type errors. (Sorry for the copious scare-quotes.)