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...or a b c f because all the parentheses are unnecessary too (Forth nudge ;-) ) I think that Smalltalk deserves a little bit of opened mind here. In many resp

...or a b c f because all the parentheses are unnecessary too (Forth nudge ;-) ) I think that Smalltalk deserves a little bit of opened mind here. In many respects, it is the closest thing to Lisp machines experience you can get today.

lisper 4y ago
> all the parentheses are unnecessary too That's not quite true. In Forth it is impossible to tell syntactically where the function calls are. > it is the closest thing to Lisp machines experience you can get today. I think Clozure Common Lisp running on a Mac (i.e. with the IDE) is pretty close as well. But I don't begrudge anyone their Smalltalk. It's just not a good impedance match to my brain.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > It's just not a good impedance match to my brain. I think that's the answer to every language war ever. "To my brain." If you claim "X is easier to understand", you get a war. But if you claim "for my brain, X is easier to understand", that's a lot harder to have a war about. All someone can reply is "well, my brain is different", which... OK, your brain is different. Fine. (Or someone could claim that nobody could actually have a brain such that X is easy to understand, at which point it's pretty clear who the unreasonable zealot is.) In fact, I think this is also the answer to the editor wars. It may even be the answer to the political wars.
  - lisper 4y ago
    Well, not quite. Some languages are by design good impedance matches to brains that don't know very much. BASIC is the canonical example. It's really easy to learn, which makes it attractive to beginners, but it has some pretty serious limitations that you only become aware of after discharging a certain amount of ignorance. IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages. To me, Lisp makes every other language I know feel like BASIC in the sense that the distinguishing features of the language feel to me like they are designed to appeal to ignorance rather than to empower.
    - dwohnitmok 4y ago
      > IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages. "IMHO" and "objectively" are in fairly stark opposition.
      - lisper 4y ago
        Not really. All quality metrics are subjective. But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it. For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily. If your goal is something else, like challenging yourself to overcome adversity, then Brainfuck might be objectively better than C.
        dwohnitmok 4y ago
        > But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it. I agree, but the scope of your assessments will be very limited, and also you end up writing tautologies (if your objective quality metric is A, then you've redefined "better" to mean exactly A). In particular, the scope of your assessments will be far more limited than the example you give (words such as "easy," "simple," etc. are unlikely to enter the statement without some rigorous definition, but therefore also highly restrictive, underlying it). > For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily. I would not take a bet, that if you presented Brainfuck and C to all > 7 billion living humans, there would not be at least one person who found it easier to write software in Brainfuck than in C. Certainly I could imagine a hypothetical human for which it would not be true.
- samatman 4y ago
  > In Forth it is impossible to tell syntactically where the function calls are. To be fair, this is true of Common Lisp as well, macros aren't functions. Forth doesn't really have functions, it has words, they're broadly useful like functions but are a differently-literal sort of memory object from a lisp function defined with cons cells. So you can't know where the function calls are, there is no such animal, but you do know where the word boundaries are, it's the whitespace, and in Forth that's what you care about.
  - lisper 4y ago
    > macros aren't functions That's true, and it is arguable that Lisp could be improved by making macro invocations have a distinguished syntax. But in practice it's usually pretty clear what is a macro and what is a function because of naming conventions, and because macros commonly admit syntax that would be illegal in a function call e.g. (let ((x 1)) ...) But however bad this problem is in Lisp, it's much worse in Forth. > Forth doesn't really have functions That is debatable. If I write 1 2 + 3 * then I think of the + and the * as function invocations that take their arguments off the stack and leave their results on the stack. It's true that this is not exactly the same as a function call in Lisp, but it's similar. In any case, if I write: a b c d e f g h i j there is absolutely no way to tell what that is going to do without knowing what every letter means. By way of contrast, if I write: (a (b c d) (e f) (g h (i j))) then it's a pretty good bet that a is a function that takes three arguments, b and g are functions that takes two arguments, e and i are functions that take one argument, and c d f h and j are variables.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      What you don't get in FORTH is arity information from the syntax, because everything is simply treated as a function from stack to stack. Unfortunately it's not feasible to keep the cleanliness of the FORTH syntax while providing that info (one would need a 2D view for that, where multiple arguments to the same function can be seen in parallel) so a parens-based syntax is arguably the next best choice.
      - 4y ago
- ralphc 4y ago
  You must have run Clozure a while back, I went to the App Store and the version of CCL there hasn't run properly since Sierra, according to reviews. I myself can't run it on Mojave or Catalina.
  - lisper 4y ago
    Yes, the app store version hasn't been updated in a long time but if you build from source it will run on Catalina. Maybe later too, I haven't tried it.

lisper 4y ago

> all the parentheses are unnecessary too That's not quite true. In Forth it is impossible to tell syntactically where the function calls are. > it is the closest thing to Lisp machines experience you can get today. I think Clozure Common Lisp running on a Mac (i.e. with the IDE) is pretty close as well. But I don't begrudge anyone their Smalltalk. It's just not a good impedance match to my brain.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> It's just not a good impedance match to my brain. I think that's the answer to every language war ever. "To my brain." If you claim "X is easier to understand", you get a war. But if you claim "for my brain, X is easier to understand", that's a lot harder to have a war about. All someone can reply is "well, my brain is different", which... OK, your brain is different. Fine. (Or someone could claim that nobody could actually have a brain such that X is easy to understand, at which point it's pretty clear who the unreasonable zealot is.) In fact, I think this is also the answer to the editor wars. It may even be the answer to the political wars.
- lisper 4y ago
  Well, not quite. Some languages are by design good impedance matches to brains that don't know very much. BASIC is the canonical example. It's really easy to learn, which makes it attractive to beginners, but it has some pretty serious limitations that you only become aware of after discharging a certain amount of ignorance. IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages. To me, Lisp makes every other language I know feel like BASIC in the sense that the distinguishing features of the language feel to me like they are designed to appeal to ignorance rather than to empower.
  - dwohnitmok 4y ago
    > IMHO this makes BASIC objectively worse than other languages. "IMHO" and "objectively" are in fairly stark opposition.
    - lisper 4y ago
      Not really. All quality metrics are subjective. But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it. For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily. If your goal is something else, like challenging yourself to overcome adversity, then Brainfuck might be objectively better than C.
      - dwohnitmok 4y ago
        > But if you accept a particular quality metric, then you can objectively assess things against it. I agree, but the scope of your assessments will be very limited, and also you end up writing tautologies (if your objective quality metric is A, then you've redefined "better" to mean exactly A). In particular, the scope of your assessments will be far more limited than the example you give (words such as "easy," "simple," etc. are unlikely to enter the statement without some rigorous definition, but therefore also highly restrictive, underlying it). > For example, C is objectively better than Brainfuck if your goal is to write software easily. I would not take a bet, that if you presented Brainfuck and C to all > 7 billion living humans, there would not be at least one person who found it easier to write software in Brainfuck than in C. Certainly I could imagine a hypothetical human for which it would not be true.
samatman 4y ago
> In Forth it is impossible to tell syntactically where the function calls are. To be fair, this is true of Common Lisp as well, macros aren't functions. Forth doesn't really have functions, it has words, they're broadly useful like functions but are a differently-literal sort of memory object from a lisp function defined with cons cells. So you can't know where the function calls are, there is no such animal, but you do know where the word boundaries are, it's the whitespace, and in Forth that's what you care about.
- lisper 4y ago
  > macros aren't functions That's true, and it is arguable that Lisp could be improved by making macro invocations have a distinguished syntax. But in practice it's usually pretty clear what is a macro and what is a function because of naming conventions, and because macros commonly admit syntax that would be illegal in a function call e.g. (let ((x 1)) ...) But however bad this problem is in Lisp, it's much worse in Forth. > Forth doesn't really have functions That is debatable. If I write 1 2 + 3 * then I think of the + and the * as function invocations that take their arguments off the stack and leave their results on the stack. It's true that this is not exactly the same as a function call in Lisp, but it's similar. In any case, if I write: a b c d e f g h i j there is absolutely no way to tell what that is going to do without knowing what every letter means. By way of contrast, if I write: (a (b c d) (e f) (g h (i j))) then it's a pretty good bet that a is a function that takes three arguments, b and g are functions that takes two arguments, e and i are functions that take one argument, and c d f h and j are variables.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    What you don't get in FORTH is arity information from the syntax, because everything is simply treated as a function from stack to stack. Unfortunately it's not feasible to keep the cleanliness of the FORTH syntax while providing that info (one would need a 2D view for that, where multiple arguments to the same function can be seen in parallel) so a parens-based syntax is arguably the next best choice.
    - 4y ago
ralphc 4y ago
You must have run Clozure a while back, I went to the App Store and the version of CCL there hasn't run properly since Sierra, according to reviews. I myself can't run it on Mojave or Catalina.
- lisper 4y ago
  Yes, the app store version hasn't been updated in a long time but if you build from source it will run on Catalina. Maybe later too, I haven't tried it.