5 ms·
Every time I see a lisp post like this my first thought is “just use the right tool for the job” and lisp is exactly NOT always the right tool for the job.
by dgfitz 2y ago
Every time I see a lisp post like this my first thought is “just use the right tool for the job” and lisp is exactly NOT always the right tool for the job.
- boothby 2y agoTo be entirely pedantic: if the job is developing a correct mental model for setf, lisp may be exactly the right tool for the job.
- waynecochran 2y agoAh… these damn pragmatic facts always ruin everything!
- dgfitz 2y agoWayne, I heart you.
- medstrom 2y agoIf you think that every time, it is never the right tool for the job?
- dgfitz 2y agoI mean, if you want to be obtuse. Sometimes a lisp is the right tool, sometimes it isn’t. Claiming that “getting out of bed and programming in anything other than a lisp makes life less worth living” is at best as extremely immature and strange stance to take.
- medstrom 2y agoThat quote's not in TFA, nor anything like it.
- waynecochran 2y agoThere is one use of Lisp that dominates all other languages: rapid algorithm prototyping. In fact, HN was founded by Paul Graham who knew this secret and exploited it well.
- dgfitz 2y agoOh, I’m well aware. Turns out HN isn’t successful because of lisp. Edit: upon further reflection, this whole “lisp evangelism” is pretty tired. It’s not some magic bullet. Idgaf if paul goddamn graham knows how to write code in lisp. That means basically nothing, at all.
- mst 2y agolibera #perl often comments that part of the zen of perl and actually being good at it is knowing when to use something else. Sometimes people get offended when we give them a fully working awk/sed one-liner that does the job better but, uh, that's what we would have used ourselves! (or "that's seriously computation heavy, use C/Rust/Julia/etc. because much though we love the perl5 VM for quick scripts and large-scale OO business logic apps this is not going to work nicely and trying to force perl to do it will be a rathole") Though I do sort of miss my 'green threads via call/cc in guile sitting atop an ancient but functional perl event loop' system, it was ~20 years ago now and I'm not suggesting anybody else would ever want to use it, but in some ways it was still nicer than modern async/await style event loop driving nonetheless. (yes, I'm an outlier and should not be counted)
- dgfitz 2y agoWe may be in violent agreement. Handing someone a awk line instead of a lisp binary is exactly what I meant.
- mst 2y agoYep, that was very much meant to be a "yes, and" reply. There's quite the overlap between perlers and lispers because of (among other things) the shared love of 'building the language up towards the problem.' People have been known to describe bits of my perl code as easiest read by treating it as lisp that incidentally uses a really weird sort of M-expressions and runs on the perl5 VM ;)