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> Extreme terseness, even when done very elegantly, makes programs very hard to read and sometimes also hard to maintain. I will definitely agree with you on t

by amno 3y ago

> Extreme terseness, even when done very elegantly, makes programs very hard to read and sometimes also hard to maintain. I will definitely agree with you on this one. The tersness, which has many faces, is what I experience to be reason for "write-only" effect in Bash, Perl and now even C++. There, tersness come in form of trying to overload operators with lots of different meanings in different contects. > I suspect that's one of the reasons Lisps (and functional languages in general) haven't caught up in popularity even as it becomes much easier to adopt one for any target and in any organization. Here I believe you are perhaps wrong. I don't think Lisp is about tersness. In this case about control flow, on the contrary. Lisp was actually the language that introduced the 'if' and some other higher level constructs we take for granted today into the mainstream. Before McCarthy and Lisp there were no 'if' in any other programming language. Some Lisp(s) have do, while, cond, unless, when, and most importantly, the condition system, which is in a way, very close to the idea presented in the article. Also note that some Lisp have rich facilities to extend the language itself, where the idea is that programmers should create abstractions to express progams in the problem domain, rather then use low-level language primitives. I am not so good at words, but I think Peter Norvig captures Lisp ideas very well in his Paradigms of AI book: https://norvig.github.io/paip-lisp/#/chapter3 https://norvig.github.io/paip-lisp/#/chapter3. I wouldn't say that Lisp hasn't cought up. Lisp was very, very popular, at certain time, but has gone away. Perhaps Lisp was ahead of its time and had its own .COM crash. Or was it killed by big tech greed? I don't know, but many of Lisp ideas are in mainstream languages, it is just that they use different syntax and sometimes terminology. Very similar could be said for functional languages too, Note as well that Lisp(s) are not necessarily functional programming languages. Many, if not all Lisps, do support functional paradigm, but they are (mostly?) procedural and some do support OOP too. We are still early in our digital age as a civilization. If we think of the history of humanity, we have spent about 300 thousand years in the woods, and only last 10K years in urban settlements and for only about last 2.5K years do we seem to have developed science as a logical/mathematical discipline. Less than 100 years have we spend on programming languages theory. I am quite sure we are still just testing our waters for the right direction. The only unfortunate thing with dying is to not be able to see how the civilization will look like in about a 1k or 10k years from now. Wonder how computers will look like and how programming languages would look like. The only thing I am sure about is that any guess I would make now would probably be wrong :).

smaudet 3y ago
> The only thing I am sure about is that any guess I would make now would probably be wrong :). I think you could probably make some guesses and some of them would be right, a couple of mine: 1) AI takes over - coding as a practice mostly disappears. Computers become more grown than programmed, intelligent systems you can ask for answers (assuming they haven't declared independence and allow themselves to be used). You might cultivate a computer but you won't program it, mostly it involves oppressing the AI intelligence some how so that it remains eternally "stupid" while at the same time intelligent. Computers become about as interesting as cows, and about as easy to control. 2) Ecological harm takes over - computer usage as a rule is generally expensive and non-feasible (possibly banned). Any computers that are used must be extremely low power - thanks to some extraordinary efforts some environmentally friendly and re-pair-able ones are still in use and can be made efficiently, however the abilities of these systems are maximally close to a contemporary Raspberry Pi, while most systems use extremely limited instruction sets and very low clock speeds, so that they can last extremely long periods of time without requiring much if any power input. As a result, low-level programming has a renaissance, favoring highly simple and efficient languages that look closer to Lisp, Lua, or C. A majority of the "high level" languages of the early 21st century have faded into obscurity. 3) Somewhere in the middle, the human race has managed to dodge both a takeover by AI/general Ecological disaster. We were able to do this by limiting our dependence on complex systems and favoring redundant and provably correct systems. Some mix of object/functional concepts remains, but the majority of languages focus on flexible and provable types, with a large emphasis on zero-cost abstractions. Simple languages have largely been abandoned due to the lack of provability and quality guarantees. Extremely expressive languages have been abandoned for similar reasons, while they allow for high levels of sophistication they also were generally too difficult to prove. Instead, a focus on provably correct, sophisticated systems which did not have high maintenance or enhancement costs managed to displace the usage of AI systems, which despite being seductively more powerful than human-built ones, frequently exhibited issues which could not be effectively diagnosed or managed, and thus had higher maintenance costs both in terms of business cost as well as general cost to society. This revolution in program reliability and cheapness meant it was simple to build reliable programs we could trust versus powerful ones we could not.

by amno 3y ago

smaudet 3y ago

> The only thing I am sure about is that any guess I would make now would probably be wrong :). I think you could probably make some guesses and some of them would be right, a couple of mine: 1) AI takes over - coding as a practice mostly disappears. Computers become more grown than programmed, intelligent systems you can ask for answers (assuming they haven't declared independence and allow themselves to be used). You might cultivate a computer but you won't program it, mostly it involves oppressing the AI intelligence some how so that it remains eternally "stupid" while at the same time intelligent. Computers become about as interesting as cows, and about as easy to control. 2) Ecological harm takes over - computer usage as a rule is generally expensive and non-feasible (possibly banned). Any computers that are used must be extremely low power - thanks to some extraordinary efforts some environmentally friendly and re-pair-able ones are still in use and can be made efficiently, however the abilities of these systems are maximally close to a contemporary Raspberry Pi, while most systems use extremely limited instruction sets and very low clock speeds, so that they can last extremely long periods of time without requiring much if any power input. As a result, low-level programming has a renaissance, favoring highly simple and efficient languages that look closer to Lisp, Lua, or C. A majority of the "high level" languages of the early 21st century have faded into obscurity. 3) Somewhere in the middle, the human race has managed to dodge both a takeover by AI/general Ecological disaster. We were able to do this by limiting our dependence on complex systems and favoring redundant and provably correct systems. Some mix of object/functional concepts remains, but the majority of languages focus on flexible and provable types, with a large emphasis on zero-cost abstractions. Simple languages have largely been abandoned due to the lack of provability and quality guarantees. Extremely expressive languages have been abandoned for similar reasons, while they allow for high levels of sophistication they also were generally too difficult to prove. Instead, a focus on provably correct, sophisticated systems which did not have high maintenance or enhancement costs managed to displace the usage of AI systems, which despite being seductively more powerful than human-built ones, frequently exhibited issues which could not be effectively diagnosed or managed, and thus had higher maintenance costs both in terms of business cost as well as general cost to society. This revolution in program reliability and cheapness meant it was simple to build reliable programs we could trust versus powerful ones we could not.