13 ms·

New Lisp-Stat Release

105 points by Lisp-Stat 4y ago

rajandatta 4y ago
Anyone know if there's a Scheme equivalent to lisp-stat. It looks really good. But I'm much more familiar with Scheme than Lisp.
- Tarq0n 4y ago
  R is heavily inspired by Scheme, though I'm not sure if it's close enough for your liking.
- hatmatrix 4y ago
  I also would have thought Scheme to be the natural choice, but I get that "CL" is considered industrial-grade and as many people in the CL community have its advocates.
Lisp-Stat 4y ago
Third major refactoring. Plotting significantly upgraded.
- lioeters 4y ago
  Fascinating project! Thank you for sharing, I plan to dig deeper. A minor detail about the site: on the Privacy page, the first paragraph is covered up by the site header.
peatmoss 4y ago
Impressive release. I love the pragmatic approach of targeting Vega-Lite to get powerful plotting out of the gates.
brabel 4y ago
There's a lot of examples of plots made with lisp-stat at https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/examples/plotting/ https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/examples/plotting/. Looks really nice, I'll be using this next time I need charts! I had been using a Rust crate which was really hard to use and plots were uglier than this library's.
auvi 4y ago
The bottom of the page says "© 2022 Symbolics Pte". Any relations with the Symbolics of the Lisp Machine fame?
- Lisp-Stat 4y ago
  No relation. The name was just used because we thought it would be cool to try and revive the spirit of the old company, and the name is long dead.
  - tpejrl23432 4y ago
    You guys registered this name in SG ? Uber cool.
_ofdw 4y ago
I've been using lisp-stat in production as part of an algorithmic trading application I wrote. It's been very solid, and though the plotting is (perhaps was, in light of this new release) kinda unwieldy, I really enjoyed using it. Excited to check out the newest release.
- mxben 4y ago
  Can you (or anyone who has run Lisp software in production) share how the experience has been? Do the management and other colleagues like it? Do they express any concerns? Want to understand the social aspect of running Lisp in production.
  - abrax3141 4y ago
    I’ve run lisp in production (SBCL). Fast to develop and run, and solid. Unfortunately the engineering team tasked with taking the product forward decided to rewrite it entirely in some version of react on (the quite unfortunately named, from my point of view) AWS lambdas because the frameworks these days are so choc full of stuff, most importantly security stuff!, that nothing can really compete with them anymore, even though the engineering overhead to use them is massive. (Edit: To be fair, the engineering overhead for me to write all that crap into Lisp would have been way more massive.) As a non-user-facing back-end, however, lisp is fantastic.
  - varjag 4y ago
    We're using CL in prod for an embedded system (https://evacsound.com/ https://evacsound.com/) for some years now, fairly smooth sailing. It started out as an MVP/prototype so implementation was of no concern, then gained enough velocity and market interest that a rewrite was infeasible. We re-train talent on the job instead. Incidentally I also did an algo trading system in CL at some point (who didn't?). The sibling comment is spot on that outside of deep backend it's a self-reinforcing ecosystem with too much focus on auxiliary stuff if you have to re-implement it.
- medo-bear 4y ago
  institutional or retail? i wanted to do this on a retail scale but i don't know where to start as far as APIs for orders and market feeds. do you have any pointers?
hatmatrix 4y ago
Can this compete with the momentum/performance of Julia? I'd be stoked if this became widely adopted but community size seems to be a huge determinant of success with these types of languages.
- medo-bear 4y ago
  the rally call of lisps is to get a lot done with less, so it is definitely possible that it can compete in some sense. also common lisp packages such as these can cater to the programmer-first type of data scientist by allowing greater (interactive) tinkering with the underlying code
  - sieste 4y ago
    >> cater to the programmer-first type of data scientist Exactly. Especially those who want to dabble with lisp by playing with familiar problems and applications. I find it much more instructive to play with linear regression code in a new language than with, say, a game development engine, because I have a pretty good idea about the strengths and quirks of `lm` in R.
- lukego 4y ago
  I migrated from Lisp to Julia for the ecosystem. It hasn't been worth it from my point of view. I'll migrate back to Lisp eventually. So I can easily imagine packages like this becoming widely adopted /within/ the Lisp community.
  - tpejrl23432 4y ago
    Could you elaborate on this a bit ? Lisp has next to no numerical libraries IIRC ?
    - vindarel 4y ago
      won't answer but a good starting point is https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#numerical-and-scientific https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#numerical-and-sci..., did you see it? It has some libraries, for example magicl is developed by and for Quantum companies.
hatmatrix 4y ago
Reminds me that there was an attempt to realize the "Back to the Future" vision in Clojure. https://github.com/incanter/incanter https://github.com/incanter/incanter It never took off but looks like there was modifications made up until three years ago.
- fulafel 4y ago
  There's a lively data science Clojure community and many libs, see eg: https://scicloj.github.io/docs/resources/libs/ https://scicloj.github.io/docs/resources/libs/
singaporecode 4y ago
Those charts look so clean and crisp!
- dang 4y ago
  Please stop using multiple accounts and please don't use HN primarily for promotion—it's against the site guidelines. We've banned this account and some others. If you stick to one account and submit your own stuff as part of a mix of unrelated things, and don't overdo it, that would be ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - commonlisper 4y ago
    In case it is not apparent to others, Lisp-Stat (OP of this story) and singaporecode (parent commenter here) are different people. The account singaporecode and a few other related accounts really look dubious. They are promoting a few websites created by the same author: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ashok%20khanna&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ashok%20khanna&type=all The comments by singaporecode where they say "I should sponsor the guide’s author" (when the author is himself/herself/themselves) and "I found online" (where they published it themselves) are clearly deceptive self-promotions of https://ashok-khanna.medium.com/ https://ashok-khanna.medium.com/ and https://github.com/ashok-khanna https://github.com/ashok-khanna but do notice that they are unrelated to Lisp-Stat.
jhbadger 4y ago
This is really exciting! I'm a big Lisp-Stat fan, although like everybody else I've been using R for the past twenty years.
yakubin 4y ago
Am I understanding it right that those plots are only generated in HTML form? I.e. I can't use it to generate an EPS file to be included in a LaTeX document?
- peatmoss 4y ago
  I believe the engine vega-lite can create an svg, which is pretty easily converted to eps/pdf etc.
  - Lisp-Stat 4y ago
    Yes, vega can do that. If you click on the round button with three ellipses (...) you'll see a menu and one of the options is a PNG or SVG download of the plot.
classified 4y ago
Requiring Chrome is a dealbreaker for me. I prefer statistics without spyware.
- Lisp-Stat 4y ago
  That requirement has been relaxed. I use Firefox. I'll update the docs.
mrbukkake 4y ago
(ql:quickload :plot/vega) isn't working for me with the latest quicklisp dist, what am I doing wrong
- bobochan 4y ago
  Glad it is not just me. I did a clean install and follow the examples on the web site step by step: debugger invoked on a QUICKLISP-CLIENT:SYSTEM-NOT-FOUND in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: System "plot/vega" not found
- vindarel 4y ago
  Quicklisp ships releases once a month (think Debian releases instead of npm), so it is very possible it didn't pick the latest release yet. Your solution is to clone the repository into ~/quicklisp/local-projects/. Another one would be to use the Ultralisp distribution, that ships every five minutes. https://ultralisp.org/ https://ultralisp.org/ (ql-dist:install-dist "http://dist.ultralisp.org/ http://dist.ultralisp.org/" :prompt nil) and now you could quickload plot/vega, except we must ask the author to add it, it takes a couple mouse clicks.
  - bobochan 4y ago
    I gave this a try but still ran into issues. First it was a missing file, description.text, so I created a temporary one, but have not been able to figure it out after going through all of the different possibilities on the web site and github. I am going to keep an eye on this project because I would really like to be able to work on this. Hopefully updates in a month or so will get things in sync.
    - Lisp-Stat 4y ago
      FIXED. That's a new file to help with the auto generated API documentation and it's possible one was missed at checkin. Vindarel has correctly identified the main problem though, Quicklisp hasn't yet picked up the new files.

105 points by Lisp-Stat 4y ago

Anyone know if there's a Scheme equivalent to lisp-stat. It looks really good. But I'm much more familiar with Scheme than Lisp.

Tarq0n 4y ago
R is heavily inspired by Scheme, though I'm not sure if it's close enough for your liking.
hatmatrix 4y ago
I also would have thought Scheme to be the natural choice, but I get that "CL" is considered industrial-grade and as many people in the CL community have its advocates.

Lisp-Stat 4y ago

Third major refactoring. Plotting significantly upgraded.

lioeters 4y ago
Fascinating project! Thank you for sharing, I plan to dig deeper. A minor detail about the site: on the Privacy page, the first paragraph is covered up by the site header.

peatmoss 4y ago

Impressive release. I love the pragmatic approach of targeting Vega-Lite to get powerful plotting out of the gates.

brabel 4y ago

There's a lot of examples of plots made with lisp-stat at https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/examples/plotting/ https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/examples/plotting/. Looks really nice, I'll be using this next time I need charts! I had been using a Rust crate which was really hard to use and plots were uglier than this library's.

auvi 4y ago

Lisp-Stat 4y ago
No relation. The name was just used because we thought it would be cool to try and revive the spirit of the old company, and the name is long dead.
- tpejrl23432 4y ago
  You guys registered this name in SG ? Uber cool.

_ofdw 4y ago

I've been using lisp-stat in production as part of an algorithmic trading application I wrote. It's been very solid, and though the plotting is (perhaps was, in light of this new release) kinda unwieldy, I really enjoyed using it. Excited to check out the newest release.

mxben 4y ago
Can you (or anyone who has run Lisp software in production) share how the experience has been? Do the management and other colleagues like it? Do they express any concerns? Want to understand the social aspect of running Lisp in production.
- abrax3141 4y ago
  I’ve run lisp in production (SBCL). Fast to develop and run, and solid. Unfortunately the engineering team tasked with taking the product forward decided to rewrite it entirely in some version of react on (the quite unfortunately named, from my point of view) AWS lambdas because the frameworks these days are so choc full of stuff, most importantly security stuff!, that nothing can really compete with them anymore, even though the engineering overhead to use them is massive. (Edit: To be fair, the engineering overhead for me to write all that crap into Lisp would have been way more massive.) As a non-user-facing back-end, however, lisp is fantastic.
- varjag 4y ago
  We're using CL in prod for an embedded system (https://evacsound.com/ https://evacsound.com/) for some years now, fairly smooth sailing. It started out as an MVP/prototype so implementation was of no concern, then gained enough velocity and market interest that a rewrite was infeasible. We re-train talent on the job instead. Incidentally I also did an algo trading system in CL at some point (who didn't?). The sibling comment is spot on that outside of deep backend it's a self-reinforcing ecosystem with too much focus on auxiliary stuff if you have to re-implement it.
medo-bear 4y ago
institutional or retail? i wanted to do this on a retail scale but i don't know where to start as far as APIs for orders and market feeds. do you have any pointers?

hatmatrix 4y ago

Can this compete with the momentum/performance of Julia? I'd be stoked if this became widely adopted but community size seems to be a huge determinant of success with these types of languages.

medo-bear 4y ago
the rally call of lisps is to get a lot done with less, so it is definitely possible that it can compete in some sense. also common lisp packages such as these can cater to the programmer-first type of data scientist by allowing greater (interactive) tinkering with the underlying code
- sieste 4y ago
  >> cater to the programmer-first type of data scientist Exactly. Especially those who want to dabble with lisp by playing with familiar problems and applications. I find it much more instructive to play with linear regression code in a new language than with, say, a game development engine, because I have a pretty good idea about the strengths and quirks of `lm` in R.
lukego 4y ago
I migrated from Lisp to Julia for the ecosystem. It hasn't been worth it from my point of view. I'll migrate back to Lisp eventually. So I can easily imagine packages like this becoming widely adopted /within/ the Lisp community.
- tpejrl23432 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on this a bit ? Lisp has next to no numerical libraries IIRC ?
  - vindarel 4y ago
    won't answer but a good starting point is https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#numerical-and-scientific https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#numerical-and-sci..., did you see it? It has some libraries, for example magicl is developed by and for Quantum companies.

hatmatrix 4y ago

Reminds me that there was an attempt to realize the "Back to the Future" vision in Clojure. https://github.com/incanter/incanter https://github.com/incanter/incanter It never took off but looks like there was modifications made up until three years ago.

fulafel 4y ago
There's a lively data science Clojure community and many libs, see eg: https://scicloj.github.io/docs/resources/libs/ https://scicloj.github.io/docs/resources/libs/

singaporecode 4y ago

Those charts look so clean and crisp!

dang 4y ago
Please stop using multiple accounts and please don't use HN primarily for promotion—it's against the site guidelines. We've banned this account and some others. If you stick to one account and submit your own stuff as part of a mix of unrelated things, and don't overdo it, that would be ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- commonlisper 4y ago
  In case it is not apparent to others, Lisp-Stat (OP of this story) and singaporecode (parent commenter here) are different people. The account singaporecode and a few other related accounts really look dubious. They are promoting a few websites created by the same author: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ashok%20khanna&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ashok%20khanna&type=all The comments by singaporecode where they say "I should sponsor the guide’s author" (when the author is himself/herself/themselves) and "I found online" (where they published it themselves) are clearly deceptive self-promotions of https://ashok-khanna.medium.com/ https://ashok-khanna.medium.com/ and https://github.com/ashok-khanna https://github.com/ashok-khanna but do notice that they are unrelated to Lisp-Stat.

jhbadger 4y ago

This is really exciting! I'm a big Lisp-Stat fan, although like everybody else I've been using R for the past twenty years.

yakubin 4y ago

Am I understanding it right that those plots are only generated in HTML form? I.e. I can't use it to generate an EPS file to be included in a LaTeX document?

peatmoss 4y ago
I believe the engine vega-lite can create an svg, which is pretty easily converted to eps/pdf etc.
- Lisp-Stat 4y ago
  Yes, vega can do that. If you click on the round button with three ellipses (...) you'll see a menu and one of the options is a PNG or SVG download of the plot.

classified 4y ago

Requiring Chrome is a dealbreaker for me. I prefer statistics without spyware.

Lisp-Stat 4y ago
That requirement has been relaxed. I use Firefox. I'll update the docs.

mrbukkake 4y ago

(ql:quickload :plot/vega) isn't working for me with the latest quicklisp dist, what am I doing wrong

bobochan 4y ago
Glad it is not just me. I did a clean install and follow the examples on the web site step by step: debugger invoked on a QUICKLISP-CLIENT:SYSTEM-NOT-FOUND in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: System "plot/vega" not found
vindarel 4y ago
Quicklisp ships releases once a month (think Debian releases instead of npm), so it is very possible it didn't pick the latest release yet. Your solution is to clone the repository into ~/quicklisp/local-projects/. Another one would be to use the Ultralisp distribution, that ships every five minutes. https://ultralisp.org/ https://ultralisp.org/ (ql-dist:install-dist "http://dist.ultralisp.org/ http://dist.ultralisp.org/" :prompt nil) and now you could quickload plot/vega, except we must ask the author to add it, it takes a couple mouse clicks.
- bobochan 4y ago
  I gave this a try but still ran into issues. First it was a missing file, description.text, so I created a temporary one, but have not been able to figure it out after going through all of the different possibilities on the web site and github. I am going to keep an eye on this project because I would really like to be able to work on this. Hopefully updates in a month or so will get things in sync.
  - Lisp-Stat 4y ago
    FIXED. That's a new file to help with the auto generated API documentation and it's possible one was missed at checkin. Vindarel has correctly identified the main problem though, Quicklisp hasn't yet picked up the new files.