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> I find it funny and also ironic that a lot of modern languages re-discover Lisp's amazing features decades later. This is never surprising as Lispy languages
by eikenberry 2y ago
> I find it funny and also ironic that a lot of modern languages re-discover Lisp's amazing features decades later.
This is never surprising as Lispy languages are some of the most flexible and expressive languages. But that's the problem, it is too expressive. The Lisps always reminded me of mixed media (visual) art, where the freedom of expression from the mixed media sounds good on the face of it but in the end it generally produces sub-par works compared to more traditional single media art. It turns out that the restrictions of the medium are just as important as the expressiveness.
- sweeter 2y agothats a great analogy.
- eikenberry 2y agoThanks!
- cess11 2y agoI've seen shitty code running in 'prod' at every employment I've had as a developer. The language isn't that important, the people and the organisation are.
- eikenberry 2y agoIt's not important from an external standpoint, looking at code quality. Like in all the arts, most of it will be bad. That is not the point. The point is from the developers perspective as a medium. To put it another way, you can produce bad art in any medium but some mediums seem more conducive to creating good art.
- cess11 2y agoMaybe. You probably don't want to base your web development studio on colorForth for quite a few reasons but I'm not so sure artistic reasons are relatively important. You seem to think that organisational factors, like management, profitability, market influences and whatnot are less important than the conduciveness of the tooling to create good art. Why is this?
- eikenberry 2y agoIMO they are on different dimensions, orthogonal if you will. The medium will often be dictated by outside demands, but when talking about mediums themselves and the different aspects of that medium can take place without taking those into account. Just like you could discuss the differences between oil paints and acrylics without taking into account any specific work... of course if you flip that, talking acrylic or oil for a specific work, then it would matter.
- cess11 2y agoDoesn't answer my question. I'm already aware that you ignore social and other factors.
- rowanG077 2y agoLanguage is very important. Bad code in python is at least still python. Bad code in lisp can be an inpenetrable eldritch abomination where the only option is to rewrite from scratch. I believe this is actually the primary reason google build go. You can't write good code. But you also can't write really bad code.
- geon 2y ago> Bad code in lisp can be an inpenetrable eldritch abomination where the only option is to rewrite from scratch. That’s also true for good lisp.
- cess11 2y agoWhy do you believe it impossible for Python to be impenetrable? A Common Lisp will likely be much more introspectable and debuggable than your average CPython. I think Google designed Golang to be a small language for implementing network services that will tie newcomers to programming hard to that specific language and then also Google. Hence the syntactic quirks and the err spectre. That it enables development of CLI applications was likely an unexpected bonus.
- kunley 2y ago@cess11 on Golang, no, rather Ken Thompson and colleagues designed a language stripped off things they find as an unnecessary cruft and they could finally get back to the fun they had before Java and OO.
- cess11 2y ago"Finally".
- grumpyprole 2y agoI don't disagree that Java has cruft, but Go didn't fix data races, nulls or lack of sum types. It's not a "fun" language for me.
- 2y ago