3 ms·

I am very impressed that when most languages have a development time in the double digits (including the initial Haskell implementation), the Lisp version was d

by tmtvl 4y ago

I am very impressed that when most languages have a development time in the double digits (including the initial Haskell implementation), the Lisp version was developed in 3 hours. If the codebases are publicly available it would be interesting to see how understandable they are.

nine_k 4y ago
When you don't have to prove your code is correct, and just hope it generally is (a well-grounded hope for an experienced developer), highly flexible and dynamic languages like Lisp or Python or Ruby or Smalltalk will shine. Mistakes which an experienced developer makes are usually trivial and surface during interactive testing, and the development happens in a REPL. Also, simple algorithms and data structures suffice for prototyping like this. The larger the code base, and the stricter the correctness and performance requirements, the more you want to use something like Haskell, or F#, or Typescript, which allow you to exactly pin down and statically ensure certain things.
gleenn 4y ago
What do you mean by "double digit times"? Your whole statement is almost completely lost because I can't tell if you think Lisp is fast or slow. Generally people say Lisps are good at prototyping and I'd agree, Clojure is super fast.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  I'm talking about the table which shows development time in hours, as well as lines of code and lines of documentation. Come to think of it, I wonder if they counted docstrings as documentation or code?
  - lispm 4y ago
    I would guess that they used a very declarative style of Lisp programming, where much of the code looks like a specification. Here they used Common Lisp enhanced with a relational programming model, like an in-core database with an embedded query language. The developer(s) were probably quite experienced with it.

3 ms·

I am very impressed that when most languages have a development time in the double digits (including the initial Haskell implementation), the Lisp version was d

by tmtvl 4y ago

nine_k 4y ago
When you don't have to prove your code is correct, and just hope it generally is (a well-grounded hope for an experienced developer), highly flexible and dynamic languages like Lisp or Python or Ruby or Smalltalk will shine. Mistakes which an experienced developer makes are usually trivial and surface during interactive testing, and the development happens in a REPL. Also, simple algorithms and data structures suffice for prototyping like this. The larger the code base, and the stricter the correctness and performance requirements, the more you want to use something like Haskell, or F#, or Typescript, which allow you to exactly pin down and statically ensure certain things.
gleenn 4y ago
What do you mean by "double digit times"? Your whole statement is almost completely lost because I can't tell if you think Lisp is fast or slow. Generally people say Lisps are good at prototyping and I'd agree, Clojure is super fast.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  I'm talking about the table which shows development time in hours, as well as lines of code and lines of documentation. Come to think of it, I wonder if they counted docstrings as documentation or code?
  - lispm 4y ago
    I would guess that they used a very declarative style of Lisp programming, where much of the code looks like a specification. Here they used Common Lisp enhanced with a relational programming model, like an in-core database with an embedded query language. The developer(s) were probably quite experienced with it.