4 ms·

I'm sorry, but I cannot get excited over Yet Another Implementation of McCarthy's LISP[1]. If your Lisp had _any_ interesting feature, e.g. call/cc, or object s

by xyzzyz 15y ago

I'm sorry, but I cannot get excited over Yet Another Implementation of McCarthy's LISP[1]. If your Lisp had _any_ interesting feature, e.g. call/cc, or object system, or nifty macro system, or something else, then, maybe, but doing the the same old, trivial thing, again and again, does not seem very interesting for me. We don't usually see yet another Brainfuck interpreter, or yet another Fibonacci queue implementation on HN's front page, so why LISP? [1] - http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.lisp http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.lisp

yangyang 15y ago
Because it's pretty straightforward - there's very little parsing involved (in this case basically none).
- lisper 15y ago
  No, there's a lot of parsing happening. It's just that you're using (part of) the Javascript parser to do it.
jes5199 15y ago
I didn't claim it was revolutionary, I just keep hearing LISP hackers say "there's no reason to care about XML or JSON if you've got S-Expressions, which are so much cleaner" This project is exercising (proving? refuting?) that claim. I recognize that this isn't the most ambitious project in the world, but it was a Thanksgiving-weekend hack. I'm thrilled that it got the 20 votes necessary to get it on the front page of HN.
- lisper 15y ago
  I vote for "prove". All those extra and unnecessary quotes and commas. Blech. And all that extra ugliness just so you can re-use the JS parser? IMHO there's no excuse for this. It's really easy to write a parser that does the Right Thing, e.g.: http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/l.py http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/l.py
raganwald 15y ago
(cranky You know, we have the upvote arrow for things that excite you, and the “Go read something else and comment on it” feature for things that don’t float your boat. Clearly this is not spam and it is not off-topic. So: You asked the OP and/or your fellow HNers why they upvoted this onto the front page. I ask you, why this comment, what value does it add to my life to read about how smart and educated you are? What about all the people who haven’t seen an implementation of McCarthy’s Lisp? Do they not deserve to find this interesting? Should they turn in their HN accounts and head over to reddit? I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Yet I find this interesting. Is there something wrong with me? )
- raganwald 15y ago
  Raganwald, you pretentious douche: > I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Greenspun’s Tenth Law is widely accepted, demonstrations of it in action add nothing of value to the programming community. Furthermore, writing a Scheme in Java is likely to be a project where you learned nothing of interest about Lisp or about Java. —signed, Nikolai Bourbaki
  - apotheon 15y ago
    That's kind of an inappropriate response. Pointing out one has implemented Scheme with all the bells and whistles as a condition in which the implementor is still interested in Lisp implementations and similar stuff is not a pretension or a statement that it was some kind of tremendous feat. I have a motorcycle, but I'm still interested in not only other motorcycles, but also bicycles. I don't think this makes me a pretentious douche.
    - appamatto 15y ago
      Maybe he meant that his Java implementation of Scheme contains an ad-hoc implementation of Lisp.
  - appamatto 15y ago
apotheon 15y ago
I think the "any interesting feature" in this case is the fact it uses JSON rather than s-expressions. This may not be a feature you think it needs, but it's interesting nonetheless.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  It still uses S-expressions, albeit with different kind of parentheses and separators. The whole point of S-expressions is that syntax is irrelevant.

by xyzzyz 15y ago

yangyang 15y ago

Because it's pretty straightforward - there's very little parsing involved (in this case basically none).

lisper 15y ago
No, there's a lot of parsing happening. It's just that you're using (part of) the Javascript parser to do it.

jes5199 15y ago

I didn't claim it was revolutionary, I just keep hearing LISP hackers say "there's no reason to care about XML or JSON if you've got S-Expressions, which are so much cleaner" This project is exercising (proving? refuting?) that claim. I recognize that this isn't the most ambitious project in the world, but it was a Thanksgiving-weekend hack. I'm thrilled that it got the 20 votes necessary to get it on the front page of HN.

lisper 15y ago
I vote for "prove". All those extra and unnecessary quotes and commas. Blech. And all that extra ugliness just so you can re-use the JS parser? IMHO there's no excuse for this. It's really easy to write a parser that does the Right Thing, e.g.: http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/l.py http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/l.py

raganwald 15y ago

(cranky You know, we have the upvote arrow for things that excite you, and the “Go read something else and comment on it” feature for things that don’t float your boat. Clearly this is not spam and it is not off-topic. So: You asked the OP and/or your fellow HNers why they upvoted this onto the front page. I ask you, why this comment, what value does it add to my life to read about how smart and educated you are? What about all the people who haven’t seen an implementation of McCarthy’s Lisp? Do they not deserve to find this interesting? Should they turn in their HN accounts and head over to reddit? I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Yet I find this interesting. Is there something wrong with me? )

raganwald 15y ago
Raganwald, you pretentious douche: > I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Greenspun’s Tenth Law is widely accepted, demonstrations of it in action add nothing of value to the programming community. Furthermore, writing a Scheme in Java is likely to be a project where you learned nothing of interest about Lisp or about Java. —signed, Nikolai Bourbaki
- apotheon 15y ago
  That's kind of an inappropriate response. Pointing out one has implemented Scheme with all the bells and whistles as a condition in which the implementor is still interested in Lisp implementations and similar stuff is not a pretension or a statement that it was some kind of tremendous feat. I have a motorcycle, but I'm still interested in not only other motorcycles, but also bicycles. I don't think this makes me a pretentious douche.
  - appamatto 15y ago
    Maybe he meant that his Java implementation of Scheme contains an ad-hoc implementation of Lisp.
- appamatto 15y ago

apotheon 15y ago

I think the "any interesting feature" in this case is the fact it uses JSON rather than s-expressions. This may not be a feature you think it needs, but it's interesting nonetheless.

xyzzyz 15y ago
It still uses S-expressions, albeit with different kind of parentheses and separators. The whole point of S-expressions is that syntax is irrelevant.