6 ms·

The question then is how they plan to avoid The Lisp Curse (in my words, language giving you too much power makes you do weird things, and you attract people to

The question then is how they plan to avoid The Lisp Curse (in my words, language giving you too much power makes you do weird things, and you attract people to like to use things a tad too powerful / generic, and you end up with an unproductive culture).

codebje 6mo ago
The primary culture around Lean is mathematicians looking to prove mathematics. AFAICT Lean is just about the right power for that. Agda, OTOH, is IMO the dependently typed language for type theorists, and does weird things, but "unproductive" is applicable only for a somewhat narrow view of productivity. I don't consider there to be a dependently typed language for writing programs that you just want to run, but I would be delighted to be corrected on that viewpoint!
- harperlee 6mo ago
  I think Idris 2 is targeted more to programming than to doing math, no?
  - ux266478 6mo ago
    Yep. I also think it's the best designed out of any of them. As dependently typed languages have become more and more popular, I find it a bit sad that Idris has stayed relatively obscure.
    - addaon 6mo ago
      Since you've clearly looked at this a bit... would you give a sentence or two comparing Indris, F*, and the other lesser known players in this space (languages for both writing and formally verifying programs)? I find it a wide space to explore, and while ecosystem maturity seems like a huge deciding factor right now, I assume there's real and meaningful differences between the languages as well.
      - ux266478 6mo ago
        Idris is rather unique in that the development flow involves writing out your program as a trellis with "holes", and you work through your codebase interactively filling those holes. It feels like Haskell with an even more powerful type system and a companion expert system to alleviate the burden that the type-system's power entails. You're still basically always in program-land, mentally. F* (and most other dependently-typed languages, or adjacent ones like Liquid Haskell) has a whole external SMT solver layer that lives outside of the language. Think like if SML modules were even less unified with the core language, and also most of your time was spent in that layer. They're really not fun to try and make complex software with, just because the context-switching required at scale is borderline inhuman. Lean has a unified proof-system in the language like Idris, but it has much the same grain as the languages with external SMT solvers. You're spending most of your mental time in proofsland, thinking primarily about how to prove what you want to do. That's because with how Lean as a language is set up, you're basically centering all your reasoning around the goal. If there's a problem, you're adjusting the structure of your reasoning, changing your proof strategy, or identifying missing lemmas, etc. You can kind of think of it as though Idris is "inside out" compared to most of the other dependently typed languages.
  - codebje 6mo ago
    It's been a little bit since I looked at Idris, so I'll take a closer look now. The QTT behind it struck me as interesting but I didn't play around with it much. Thanks for the tip!
- yuppiemephisto 6mo ago
  lean IS that language https://github.com/alok/LeanPlot https://github.com/alok/LeanPlot
hmokiguess 6mo ago
Then again sometimes things don’t need to have productivity as a goal do they? Scale and context applies, could be seen as art even, an expression of someone’s psyche and their world model
iLemming 6mo ago
> you end up with an unproductive culture Practical Lispers would like to have a word - I've been witnessing extreme productivity on some teams. Modern Lisp dialects (Clojure and likes) largely broke library fragmentation and the "not invented here" tendency that were causing real tensions in Common Lisp. You realize that "The Lisp Curse" isn't some paper, survey or objective reflection? It's just someone's essay back from 2011 - an opinion. You can take it word-by-word and apply to say Javascript, and it would largely feel true - JS arguably has the worst fragmentation of any ecosystem; dozens of competing frameworks, build tools, bundlers, test runners; new frameworks constantly replacing old ones; "Javascript fatigue" is a real thing, etc., but nobody talks about "Curse of Javascript" I learned Lisp (once) and that opened up path to Clojure, Clojurescript, then Fennel, Janet and Clojure-Dart, libpython-clj, there's Jank that is about to break loose. And something opposite to fragmentation happened to me - all these incompatible runtimes became unified and controllable from the same substrate - I no longer feel like I'm having to switch between languages - the syntax and thinking stays stable. The runtime is just a deployment target. The curse essay says: "Lisp empowers fragmentation". Actual experience says: "Lisp provides unity across fragmentation that already existed"
- pydry 6mo ago
  >You realize that "The Lisp Curse" isn't some paper, survey or objective reflection? It's just someone's essay back from 2011 - an opinion. It's also the deficit of code we actually use day to day that is actually written in lisp. I file it under the same heading as haskell - a language that clearly has useful ideas, but...
  - ux266478 6mo ago
    You're using Lisp software right now! I think this is the most treacherous assumption people tend to make about programming languages, for a few reasons. One of them is that we really don't have any way to measure software that we actually use day to day. Think about the software controlling your local water treatment plant, traffic lights, the software your local power company relies on, the software running the servers you connect to, and all the servers those things connect to. All the infrastructure in between and the infrastructure's own infrastructure. Allegro Lisp's customers are shotgun spread in industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing. They're paying for it, so we can infer they're using it, but can anybody actually name what software is written in it? If we play six degrees of separation, accounting for the full gamut of every single computer that does something relevant to your life no matter how distant, how much of that software are you actually familiar with? The fact of the matter is that we genuinely have no broad picture. There is no introspective method to find out what software you are relying on in your day to day life, almost all of it is completely opaque and implicit. To ask "what software do I use?" is to ask an unanswerable question. So to then synthesize an answer is to work with an unsound, unsupported, incomplete conclusion, which is exactly how you end up assuming you don't use software written in Lisp, while directly using software written in Lisp (HN) Of course, even accounting for the epistemic issue, the premise is still flawed. ATS is a language with 'useful ideas, but...', Haskell is an aging pragmatic kitchen sink. Positioning the latter as the former is almost comedic.
yuppiemephisto 6mo ago
https://alok.github.io/assets/lean-position-paper.pdf https://alok.github.io/assets/lean-position-paper.pdf i talked about the lisp curse in this old paper. it's rough but explicitly mentions it

codebje 6mo ago

The primary culture around Lean is mathematicians looking to prove mathematics. AFAICT Lean is just about the right power for that. Agda, OTOH, is IMO the dependently typed language for type theorists, and does weird things, but "unproductive" is applicable only for a somewhat narrow view of productivity. I don't consider there to be a dependently typed language for writing programs that you just want to run, but I would be delighted to be corrected on that viewpoint!

harperlee 6mo ago
I think Idris 2 is targeted more to programming than to doing math, no?
- ux266478 6mo ago
  Yep. I also think it's the best designed out of any of them. As dependently typed languages have become more and more popular, I find it a bit sad that Idris has stayed relatively obscure.
  - addaon 6mo ago
    Since you've clearly looked at this a bit... would you give a sentence or two comparing Indris, F*, and the other lesser known players in this space (languages for both writing and formally verifying programs)? I find it a wide space to explore, and while ecosystem maturity seems like a huge deciding factor right now, I assume there's real and meaningful differences between the languages as well.
    - ux266478 6mo ago
      Idris is rather unique in that the development flow involves writing out your program as a trellis with "holes", and you work through your codebase interactively filling those holes. It feels like Haskell with an even more powerful type system and a companion expert system to alleviate the burden that the type-system's power entails. You're still basically always in program-land, mentally. F* (and most other dependently-typed languages, or adjacent ones like Liquid Haskell) has a whole external SMT solver layer that lives outside of the language. Think like if SML modules were even less unified with the core language, and also most of your time was spent in that layer. They're really not fun to try and make complex software with, just because the context-switching required at scale is borderline inhuman. Lean has a unified proof-system in the language like Idris, but it has much the same grain as the languages with external SMT solvers. You're spending most of your mental time in proofsland, thinking primarily about how to prove what you want to do. That's because with how Lean as a language is set up, you're basically centering all your reasoning around the goal. If there's a problem, you're adjusting the structure of your reasoning, changing your proof strategy, or identifying missing lemmas, etc. You can kind of think of it as though Idris is "inside out" compared to most of the other dependently typed languages.
- codebje 6mo ago
  It's been a little bit since I looked at Idris, so I'll take a closer look now. The QTT behind it struck me as interesting but I didn't play around with it much. Thanks for the tip!
yuppiemephisto 6mo ago
lean IS that language https://github.com/alok/LeanPlot https://github.com/alok/LeanPlot

hmokiguess 6mo ago

Then again sometimes things don’t need to have productivity as a goal do they? Scale and context applies, could be seen as art even, an expression of someone’s psyche and their world model

iLemming 6mo ago

> you end up with an unproductive culture Practical Lispers would like to have a word - I've been witnessing extreme productivity on some teams. Modern Lisp dialects (Clojure and likes) largely broke library fragmentation and the "not invented here" tendency that were causing real tensions in Common Lisp. You realize that "The Lisp Curse" isn't some paper, survey or objective reflection? It's just someone's essay back from 2011 - an opinion. You can take it word-by-word and apply to say Javascript, and it would largely feel true - JS arguably has the worst fragmentation of any ecosystem; dozens of competing frameworks, build tools, bundlers, test runners; new frameworks constantly replacing old ones; "Javascript fatigue" is a real thing, etc., but nobody talks about "Curse of Javascript" I learned Lisp (once) and that opened up path to Clojure, Clojurescript, then Fennel, Janet and Clojure-Dart, libpython-clj, there's Jank that is about to break loose. And something opposite to fragmentation happened to me - all these incompatible runtimes became unified and controllable from the same substrate - I no longer feel like I'm having to switch between languages - the syntax and thinking stays stable. The runtime is just a deployment target. The curse essay says: "Lisp empowers fragmentation". Actual experience says: "Lisp provides unity across fragmentation that already existed"

pydry 6mo ago
>You realize that "The Lisp Curse" isn't some paper, survey or objective reflection? It's just someone's essay back from 2011 - an opinion. It's also the deficit of code we actually use day to day that is actually written in lisp. I file it under the same heading as haskell - a language that clearly has useful ideas, but...
- ux266478 6mo ago
  You're using Lisp software right now! I think this is the most treacherous assumption people tend to make about programming languages, for a few reasons. One of them is that we really don't have any way to measure software that we actually use day to day. Think about the software controlling your local water treatment plant, traffic lights, the software your local power company relies on, the software running the servers you connect to, and all the servers those things connect to. All the infrastructure in between and the infrastructure's own infrastructure. Allegro Lisp's customers are shotgun spread in industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing. They're paying for it, so we can infer they're using it, but can anybody actually name what software is written in it? If we play six degrees of separation, accounting for the full gamut of every single computer that does something relevant to your life no matter how distant, how much of that software are you actually familiar with? The fact of the matter is that we genuinely have no broad picture. There is no introspective method to find out what software you are relying on in your day to day life, almost all of it is completely opaque and implicit. To ask "what software do I use?" is to ask an unanswerable question. So to then synthesize an answer is to work with an unsound, unsupported, incomplete conclusion, which is exactly how you end up assuming you don't use software written in Lisp, while directly using software written in Lisp (HN) Of course, even accounting for the epistemic issue, the premise is still flawed. ATS is a language with 'useful ideas, but...', Haskell is an aging pragmatic kitchen sink. Positioning the latter as the former is almost comedic.

yuppiemephisto 6mo ago

https://alok.github.io/assets/lean-position-paper.pdf https://alok.github.io/assets/lean-position-paper.pdf i talked about the lisp curse in this old paper. it's rough but explicitly mentions it