5 ms·

Considering how much of modern software is written in JavaScript and python, I have a hard time seeing how lisp overhead would pose much of a problem. Erlang is

Considering how much of modern software is written in JavaScript and python, I have a hard time seeing how lisp overhead would pose much of a problem. Erlang is good enough for telecom equipment for 30 years ago, so that also gives us a data point. If entertain the idea that the Von Neuman architecture may be a local maxima, then we can do even better; lisp machines had specialized instructions for lisp which allowed it to run at competitive performance to a normal programming language. The issue doesn't seem to be performance; it seems to still come down to being too eccentric for a lot of use-cases, and difficult to many humans to grasp. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

noosphr 11mo ago
>The issue doesn't seem to be performance; it seems to still come down to being too eccentric for a lot of use-cases, and difficult to many humans to grasp. Lisp is not too difficult to grasp, it's that everyone suffers from infix operator brain damage inflicted in childhood. We are in the same place Europe was in 1300. Arabic numerals are here and clearly superior. But how do we know we can trust them? After all DCCCLXXIX is so much clearer than 879 [0]. Once everyone who is wedded to infix notation is dead our great grand children will wonder what made so many people wase so much time implementing towers of abstraction to accept and render a notation that only made sense for quill and parchment. [0] https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/numbers.html#working-with-roman-numerals https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/numbers.html#work...
- nerdponx 11mo ago
  It's not about prefix notation, it's that the fully uniform syntax has legitimate ergonomic problems for editing, human reading, and static analysis. Sexprs are better for computers than for humans in a lot of ways.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    Only when not using one of the many Lisp editors that exist since Lisp Machines (Symbolics, TI), Interlisp-D (Xerox), that survive in Emacs SLIME, Cursive, LispWorks, Allegro Common Lisp, Raket, VSCode Calva.
    - nerdponx 11mo ago
      Not true at all IMO. Reading code is reading code regardless of whether you have a fancy IDE or not. S-expressions are indisputably harder to learn to read. Most languages have some flexibility in how you can format your code before it becomes unreadable or confusing. C has some, Lua has some, Ruby has some, and Python has maybe fewer but only because you're more tightly constrained by the whitespace syntax. Sexpr family languages meanwhile rely heavily on very very specific indentation structure to just make the code intelligible, let alone actually readable. It's not uncommon to see things like ))))))))) at the end of a paragraph of code. Yes, you can learn to see past it, but it's there and it's an acquired skill that simply isn't necessary for other syntax styles. And moreover, the attitude in the Lisp community that you need an IDE kind of illustrates my point. To write a Python script you can pop open literally any text editor and have a decent time just banging out your code. This can scale up to 100s or even 1000s of LoC. You can do that with Lisp or Scheme too, but it's harder, and the stacks of parentheses can get painful even if you know what you're doing, at which point you really start to benefit from a paren matcher or something more powerful like Paredit. You don't really need the full powered IDE for Lisp any more than you need it for Python. In terms of runtime-based code analysis Python or Ruby are about on par with Lisp, especially if you use a commercial IDE like Jetbrains. IDEs can and do keep a running copy of any of those interpreters in memory and dynamically pull up docstrings, look for call sites, rename methods, run a REPL, etc. Hot-reloading is almost as sketchy in Lisp as it is in Python, it's just more culturally acceptable to do it in Lisp. The difference is that Python and Ruby syntax is not uniform and therefore is much easier to work with using static analysis tools. There's a middle ground between "dumb code editor" and "full-power IDE" where Python and Ruby can exist in an editor like Neovim and a user can be surprisingly productive without any intelligent completion, or using some clunky open-source LSP integration developed by some 22 year old in his spare time. With Lisp you don't have as much middle ground of tooling, precisely because it's harder to write useful tooling for it without a running image. And this is even more painful with Scheme than with Lisp because Scheme dialects are often not equipped to do anything like that. All that is to say: s-exprs are hard to deal with for humans. They aren't for humans to read and write code. They never were. And that's OK! I love Lisp and Scheme (especially Gauche). It's just wrong to assert that everyone is brain damaged and that's why they don't use Lisp.

noosphr 11mo ago

>The issue doesn't seem to be performance; it seems to still come down to being too eccentric for a lot of use-cases, and difficult to many humans to grasp. Lisp is not too difficult to grasp, it's that everyone suffers from infix operator brain damage inflicted in childhood. We are in the same place Europe was in 1300. Arabic numerals are here and clearly superior. But how do we know we can trust them? After all DCCCLXXIX is so much clearer than 879 [0]. Once everyone who is wedded to infix notation is dead our great grand children will wonder what made so many people wase so much time implementing towers of abstraction to accept and render a notation that only made sense for quill and parchment. [0] https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/numbers.html#working-with-roman-numerals https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/numbers.html#work...

nerdponx 11mo ago
It's not about prefix notation, it's that the fully uniform syntax has legitimate ergonomic problems for editing, human reading, and static analysis. Sexprs are better for computers than for humans in a lot of ways.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Only when not using one of the many Lisp editors that exist since Lisp Machines (Symbolics, TI), Interlisp-D (Xerox), that survive in Emacs SLIME, Cursive, LispWorks, Allegro Common Lisp, Raket, VSCode Calva.
  - nerdponx 11mo ago
    Not true at all IMO. Reading code is reading code regardless of whether you have a fancy IDE or not. S-expressions are indisputably harder to learn to read. Most languages have some flexibility in how you can format your code before it becomes unreadable or confusing. C has some, Lua has some, Ruby has some, and Python has maybe fewer but only because you're more tightly constrained by the whitespace syntax. Sexpr family languages meanwhile rely heavily on very very specific indentation structure to just make the code intelligible, let alone actually readable. It's not uncommon to see things like ))))))))) at the end of a paragraph of code. Yes, you can learn to see past it, but it's there and it's an acquired skill that simply isn't necessary for other syntax styles. And moreover, the attitude in the Lisp community that you need an IDE kind of illustrates my point. To write a Python script you can pop open literally any text editor and have a decent time just banging out your code. This can scale up to 100s or even 1000s of LoC. You can do that with Lisp or Scheme too, but it's harder, and the stacks of parentheses can get painful even if you know what you're doing, at which point you really start to benefit from a paren matcher or something more powerful like Paredit. You don't really need the full powered IDE for Lisp any more than you need it for Python. In terms of runtime-based code analysis Python or Ruby are about on par with Lisp, especially if you use a commercial IDE like Jetbrains. IDEs can and do keep a running copy of any of those interpreters in memory and dynamically pull up docstrings, look for call sites, rename methods, run a REPL, etc. Hot-reloading is almost as sketchy in Lisp as it is in Python, it's just more culturally acceptable to do it in Lisp. The difference is that Python and Ruby syntax is not uniform and therefore is much easier to work with using static analysis tools. There's a middle ground between "dumb code editor" and "full-power IDE" where Python and Ruby can exist in an editor like Neovim and a user can be surprisingly productive without any intelligent completion, or using some clunky open-source LSP integration developed by some 22 year old in his spare time. With Lisp you don't have as much middle ground of tooling, precisely because it's harder to write useful tooling for it without a running image. And this is even more painful with Scheme than with Lisp because Scheme dialects are often not equipped to do anything like that. All that is to say: s-exprs are hard to deal with for humans. They aren't for humans to read and write code. They never were. And that's OK! I love Lisp and Scheme (especially Gauche). It's just wrong to assert that everyone is brain damaged and that's why they don't use Lisp.