4 ms·

I keep trying to dedicate time to getting comfortable with lisp, and it hasn't happened yet. So I just live vicariously through posts about lisps. One thing th

I keep trying to dedicate time to getting comfortable with lisp, and it hasn't happened yet. So I just live vicariously through posts about lisps. One thing that stands out about them is that they're all so happy. Try it. Search up a HN post about a Lisp. They'll be using words like "joyful". So my theory is that while lisp may have plenty of technical merits, part of why it's so great is that it's typically being used by people who are having fun. That's not to say that it would perform poorly if used under duress, but maybe there's some wisdom in not putting that experience that you enjoy anywhere near drudgery, lest it become contaminated.

cogman10 3y ago
Here's what my company experienced with lisp. We had a small group (~20 devs all together) that decided they wanted to do a lot with clojure. So they started several projects throughout the company and, for the most part, they all very much enjoyed using clojure. However, as those projects shifted into maintenance mode and that group moved on to greener pastures, we were left with a bunch of projects that were inscrutable. The big issue we ran into is that lisp LOVES to give programmers the ability to metaprogram and programmers love metaprogramming. However, when it comes to maintaining a metaprogrammed monster... that's basically just learning a new language used by nobody but this single project. The end result was that people dreaded taking charge of lisp projects. They were hard to ramp up on. Hard to maintain. And they had really strange and hard to diagnose bugs. We've since spent the money rewriting most of the projects in java. I believe there are 2 that were simply too big and complex to do such rewrites against. My takeaway is that lisp is much like perl. When you know what you are doing it can be a lot of fun, but heaven help the person that has to later read what you wrote.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  > programmers love metaprogramming and (many of them) hate writing documentation. > that's basically just learning a new language used by nobody but this single project and there is no source to learn the language from. other than the "self-documenting" code, which often isn't. I am not opposed to using abstraction. Sometimes abstractions are powerful. But the more abstract you go, the more effort you need to spend to make sure you communicated it properly to the rest of the team -- including its future members.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Are you sure you didn't just Google up the Lisp Curse and use it as an excuse to avoid engaging what was mostly idiomatic Clojure? Rampant metaprogramming is not that common in Lisp codebases, and what of there is will tend to be pretty shallow, like bits of syntactic sugar here and there. Do you have some example of the inscrutable metaprogramming?
  - cogman10 3y ago
    I have a few examples of it. One dev came up with their own macro that linked together the http client and json parsing into one magic macro which allowed them to also format the json, log it, and a bunch of other conveniences mostly for that dev. Unfortunately, the function was highly tailored to where it existed (with hard coded params and such). It's invocation ended up looking something like `(ht-j g foo 'log')` (because this dev also liked shortening everything). Another example of this is some devs wanted to make a super generic data fetching... thingy... so they came up with this wild macro where you could feed in http urls and a custom configuration and it'd expose calls to that downstream services. It allowed for a sql like interface into several different microservices. Interesting in concept, impossible to maintain. That project was ultimately scrapped. I was unaware of "the lisp curse" before my comment. This was just what my company experienced.
    - kazinator 3y ago
      Something like (ht-j g foo 'log') could be a function. Someone could do that in Javascript like htj.(g, foo, 'log') or whatever, which is no more or less clear. You wouldn't have a code generation step to deal with, but you can expand macro calls in situations when the macro body isn't readable.
tester756 3y ago
>One thing that stands out about them is that they're all so happy. Try it. Search up a HN post about a Lisp. They'll be using words like "joyful". Feels like it is relative If you spent whole life in C then anything sane will be joyful
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  On a good day I find Java is joyful.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I rather enjoy python, but somehow the culture is different. We don't spend much time talking about how much fun we're having. (I assume I'm not the only one having fun.)
Zambyte 3y ago
I spent quite a bit of effort seeking Lisp Enlightenment (TM) because of the happy people using Lisp that you mention[0]. The fact that Lisp is not used more commonly for practical applications is actually a great source of frustration for me now, and I think I share that experience with many other people who enjoy using Lisp. The thing about Lisp is that when you get used to it, you realize how needlessly obtuse so much of programming is today. So much effort has been spent making programming harder and harder to understand. At this point I truly think that if Lisp had won, the world would be quite a different place for the better. We live in a world where the average person thinks that a terminal emulator is an error window, and coding is something they identify as not being able to do. Lisp is so nice because when you understand the (extremely simple!) grammar, any vocabulary is correct. You just have to make sure that an implementation of that vocabulary is defined in terms of the vocabulary provided by the system. This is to say: the language let's you express things in the exact fidelity that you think them. That's why it's so appealing. I think that if Lisp had won, general programming would be as approachable as using a graphing calculator. [0] FWIW I found it in the SICP lectures.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I have met so many programmers who travel from job to job looking for functional programming enlightenment like an itinerant martial artist from a manga, never finding it. I've seen cults around Lisp and Haskell lead so many coders into the wilderness.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    reflects on all that code written for a paycheck Someone please lead me into the wilderness.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  > This is to say: the language let's you express things in the exact fidelity that you think them. That's why it's so appealing. Different people think differently. Having to decipher someone else's thoughts is less appealing that expressing your own. Some people are great thinkers, and their thoughts-made-code are elegant. But there is no guarantee that your colleague who started a project that you join three months later is one of them.

cogman10 3y ago

Here's what my company experienced with lisp. We had a small group (~20 devs all together) that decided they wanted to do a lot with clojure. So they started several projects throughout the company and, for the most part, they all very much enjoyed using clojure. However, as those projects shifted into maintenance mode and that group moved on to greener pastures, we were left with a bunch of projects that were inscrutable. The big issue we ran into is that lisp LOVES to give programmers the ability to metaprogram and programmers love metaprogramming. However, when it comes to maintaining a metaprogrammed monster... that's basically just learning a new language used by nobody but this single project. The end result was that people dreaded taking charge of lisp projects. They were hard to ramp up on. Hard to maintain. And they had really strange and hard to diagnose bugs. We've since spent the money rewriting most of the projects in java. I believe there are 2 that were simply too big and complex to do such rewrites against. My takeaway is that lisp is much like perl. When you know what you are doing it can be a lot of fun, but heaven help the person that has to later read what you wrote.

Viliam1234 3y ago
> programmers love metaprogramming and (many of them) hate writing documentation. > that's basically just learning a new language used by nobody but this single project and there is no source to learn the language from. other than the "self-documenting" code, which often isn't. I am not opposed to using abstraction. Sometimes abstractions are powerful. But the more abstract you go, the more effort you need to spend to make sure you communicated it properly to the rest of the team -- including its future members.
kazinator 3y ago
Are you sure you didn't just Google up the Lisp Curse and use it as an excuse to avoid engaging what was mostly idiomatic Clojure? Rampant metaprogramming is not that common in Lisp codebases, and what of there is will tend to be pretty shallow, like bits of syntactic sugar here and there. Do you have some example of the inscrutable metaprogramming?
- cogman10 3y ago
  I have a few examples of it. One dev came up with their own macro that linked together the http client and json parsing into one magic macro which allowed them to also format the json, log it, and a bunch of other conveniences mostly for that dev. Unfortunately, the function was highly tailored to where it existed (with hard coded params and such). It's invocation ended up looking something like `(ht-j g foo 'log')` (because this dev also liked shortening everything). Another example of this is some devs wanted to make a super generic data fetching... thingy... so they came up with this wild macro where you could feed in http urls and a custom configuration and it'd expose calls to that downstream services. It allowed for a sql like interface into several different microservices. Interesting in concept, impossible to maintain. That project was ultimately scrapped. I was unaware of "the lisp curse" before my comment. This was just what my company experienced.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Something like (ht-j g foo 'log') could be a function. Someone could do that in Javascript like htj.(g, foo, 'log') or whatever, which is no more or less clear. You wouldn't have a code generation step to deal with, but you can expand macro calls in situations when the macro body isn't readable.

tester756 3y ago

>One thing that stands out about them is that they're all so happy. Try it. Search up a HN post about a Lisp. They'll be using words like "joyful". Feels like it is relative If you spent whole life in C then anything sane will be joyful

PaulHoule 3y ago
On a good day I find Java is joyful.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I rather enjoy python, but somehow the culture is different. We don't spend much time talking about how much fun we're having. (I assume I'm not the only one having fun.)

Zambyte 3y ago

I spent quite a bit of effort seeking Lisp Enlightenment (TM) because of the happy people using Lisp that you mention[0]. The fact that Lisp is not used more commonly for practical applications is actually a great source of frustration for me now, and I think I share that experience with many other people who enjoy using Lisp. The thing about Lisp is that when you get used to it, you realize how needlessly obtuse so much of programming is today. So much effort has been spent making programming harder and harder to understand. At this point I truly think that if Lisp had won, the world would be quite a different place for the better. We live in a world where the average person thinks that a terminal emulator is an error window, and coding is something they identify as not being able to do. Lisp is so nice because when you understand the (extremely simple!) grammar, any vocabulary is correct. You just have to make sure that an implementation of that vocabulary is defined in terms of the vocabulary provided by the system. This is to say: the language let's you express things in the exact fidelity that you think them. That's why it's so appealing. I think that if Lisp had won, general programming would be as approachable as using a graphing calculator. [0] FWIW I found it in the SICP lectures.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I have met so many programmers who travel from job to job looking for functional programming enlightenment like an itinerant martial artist from a manga, never finding it. I've seen cults around Lisp and Haskell lead so many coders into the wilderness.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  reflects on all that code written for a paycheck Someone please lead me into the wilderness.
Viliam1234 3y ago
> This is to say: the language let's you express things in the exact fidelity that you think them. That's why it's so appealing. Different people think differently. Having to decipher someone else's thoughts is less appealing that expressing your own. Some people are great thinkers, and their thoughts-made-code are elegant. But there is no guarantee that your colleague who started a project that you join three months later is one of them.