4 ms·

There are many articles extolling the virtues of Lisp. I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and

by abetusk 3mo ago

There are many articles extolling the virtues of Lisp. I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Articles like this, and the PG articles it references, amount to "if you know, you know". I understand the appeal and I understand the explicit and implicit arguments this article is making. Computer programming has matured quite a bit in the past 60 years. I would like to see more articles that are more considered in their examination.

erichocean 3mo ago
Here you go: https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html It's been discussed many times on HN.
- dang 3mo ago
  and strangely relevant again in the age of LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126840
patrec 3mo ago
https://www.tamaspapp.eu/post/common-lisp-to-julia/ https://www.tamaspapp.eu/post/common-lisp-to-julia/
coffeemug 3mo ago
As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall into a rabbit hole of hacking fun Lisp stuff and not actually getting any work done. Other languages have this problem, but Lisp I think more so. The second flaw is that it eats perfectly capable minds for years and the results don't justify the time investment. Python or whatever is fine. I wish I took most (but not all) of the time I invested in Lisp and put it into something else instead.
- vkazanov 3mo ago
  Heh, i want to both disagree and agree. I started with pascal and then C++. And then discovered Emacs and Lisp. Boy, that was a revelation! Never ever in my life shipped a line of lisp code to production. My real life code was always Python or C++ or Java or C. All of my lisp was toys and emacs tweaks (50k loc in my config!). But most of production code is gone from my life. I am a mid-level engineering manager now. I mostly write texts, or messages, or emails, or slides... and still use emacs and lisps for fun and profit and competitive programming. Not a single production-grade lisp LOC in 20+ years. But, OTOH, i contributed to emacs, tinkered with compilers and interpreters and prog. lang. internals - all because Lisps made it interesting for me. And, in a way, this brought me closer than ever to the job of my dreams: i work for a major player in static analysis space. So yes, you are right and wrong at the same time.
lenkite 3mo ago
> I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Standardized Concurrency is basic table-stakes for a language today. CL does not have a standardized async/await or concurrency model. The standard hasn't been updated since 1995 so it will never happen.
- Jtsummers 3mo ago
  And it remains in a state of almost getting to the point of generic collections (like C++, Clojure, many others) using the standard functions, but not quite getting there. There are functions (not generic functions) which operate on sequences, but no standard way to extend what types are considered sequences (as one example). It makes sense that the 1995 version of the spec would be incremental, but without a further development (or consensus amongst the implementations if no official standard) it's difficult to continue moving forward to make better use of the language's generic function capabilities. That's where Clojure, Julia, and many others have advanced beyond what CL (by the standard) provides. The language needed at least one or two more standards to drive those features forward, but never got them.
  - Pay08 3mo ago
    I don't quite understand what you mean by generic collections in this case. Do you want to restrict a list to only contain one specific type?
    - Jtsummers 3mo ago
      I wrote that quickly and should have edited it for clarity. What I meant was a new collection type that could be treated as a sequence. https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/17_a.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/17_a.... None of the functions operating on sequences are generic, so you cannot create your own type and do a `defmethod` and have them automatically adapt to it. And unlike `print-object` which gets used by format and print and others, there's also no "protocol" (or whatever term you like) generic function you can implement which will make your collection acceptable as a sequence. You could build something like this, and maybe shadow the standard functions so that it's not a new set of functions from a user perspective, but it's a notable absence in a language with a rich OO system through CLOS. It makes sense that it wasn't in the original spec, but I still think it would have been something that would have been added if the development of CL (as a standard) had continued.
iLemming 3mo ago
> programming has matured quite a bit Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no? Clojure, Clojurescript, Clojure-Dart, Fennel, Jade, Jank, Jolt, Coalton - these are relatively recent (and still developing) languages, and this is just off the top of my head, there are so many more. Lisp is not a programming language (in a sense), it's an idea. It influenced pretty much every single PL we use today and continues to do so. You can't really "level-heatedly" criticize an idea, it's like criticizing I dunno, group theory. You can though debate about merits of a specific implementation of it.
- throwaway81523 3mo ago
  > Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no? Pretty much. See pg's famous "Blub Paradox" where he sees Lisp as the top of a tower of lesser languages. He doesn't recognize that Lisp might at best be called a limit ordinal, to use math jargon. That is, Lisp is just another Blub, and the Lisp zealots haven't figured that out. You don't necessarily want to keep going further and further up, of course. Lisp still has fascination. But e.g., in Common Lisp (I mean just the stuff in the CL spec, no ad-hoc extensions allowed) you can't write anything resembling an OS. You can in Scheme, using continuations to handle process switching. Going further up, Lisp doesn't make it easy to ensure the absence of particular behaviours in a program, what TAPL calls the purpose of a type system. Tony Morrison has a semi-realistic example of what static types can get you: http://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-design-static-typing-and-functional-programming/ http://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-de... Link still works but TLS certificate expired in 2025, tsk tsk.
  - hajile 3mo ago
    Your lisp criticism is orthogonal to the idea of lisp itself. Lisps like Coalton (lambda calculus) or Shen (sequent calculus) are strongly typed. AI is an interesting point too where being closer to a raw AST is likely an advantage because it can focus more on the semantics instead of the syntax.
    - 3mo ago
throwaway81523 3mo ago
I mentioned this already but you might like: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....
vaylian 3mo ago
The lisp curse: https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
- tug2024 3mo ago
  [dead]
pjc50 3mo ago
There seems to be a Lisp .. handedness? Certain people seem to find it mentally appealing. I would liken it to one of the really niche music genres. Only a small number of people like it, but they do so very intensely. The Stockhausen of programming. That's basically all it is. A fandom. A remarkably enduring one, but not one which has ever broken out, and therefore is unlikely to ever do so. Now in an even worse position: if you are armed with an LLM and therefore uninterested in the code itself, why on earth would you direct it to write in Lisp?

by abetusk 3mo ago

erichocean 3mo ago

Here you go: https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html It's been discussed many times on HN.

dang 3mo ago
and strangely relevant again in the age of LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126840

patrec 3mo ago

https://www.tamaspapp.eu/post/common-lisp-to-julia/ https://www.tamaspapp.eu/post/common-lisp-to-julia/

coffeemug 3mo ago

As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall into a rabbit hole of hacking fun Lisp stuff and not actually getting any work done. Other languages have this problem, but Lisp I think more so. The second flaw is that it eats perfectly capable minds for years and the results don't justify the time investment. Python or whatever is fine. I wish I took most (but not all) of the time I invested in Lisp and put it into something else instead.

vkazanov 3mo ago
Heh, i want to both disagree and agree. I started with pascal and then C++. And then discovered Emacs and Lisp. Boy, that was a revelation! Never ever in my life shipped a line of lisp code to production. My real life code was always Python or C++ or Java or C. All of my lisp was toys and emacs tweaks (50k loc in my config!). But most of production code is gone from my life. I am a mid-level engineering manager now. I mostly write texts, or messages, or emails, or slides... and still use emacs and lisps for fun and profit and competitive programming. Not a single production-grade lisp LOC in 20+ years. But, OTOH, i contributed to emacs, tinkered with compilers and interpreters and prog. lang. internals - all because Lisps made it interesting for me. And, in a way, this brought me closer than ever to the job of my dreams: i work for a major player in static analysis space. So yes, you are right and wrong at the same time.

lenkite 3mo ago

> I would like to see some articles that have a level-headed criticisms or critique of Lisp, it's ideas and it's place in the ecosystem of languages. Standardized Concurrency is basic table-stakes for a language today. CL does not have a standardized async/await or concurrency model. The standard hasn't been updated since 1995 so it will never happen.

Jtsummers 3mo ago
And it remains in a state of almost getting to the point of generic collections (like C++, Clojure, many others) using the standard functions, but not quite getting there. There are functions (not generic functions) which operate on sequences, but no standard way to extend what types are considered sequences (as one example). It makes sense that the 1995 version of the spec would be incremental, but without a further development (or consensus amongst the implementations if no official standard) it's difficult to continue moving forward to make better use of the language's generic function capabilities. That's where Clojure, Julia, and many others have advanced beyond what CL (by the standard) provides. The language needed at least one or two more standards to drive those features forward, but never got them.
- Pay08 3mo ago
  I don't quite understand what you mean by generic collections in this case. Do you want to restrict a list to only contain one specific type?
  - Jtsummers 3mo ago
    I wrote that quickly and should have edited it for clarity. What I meant was a new collection type that could be treated as a sequence. https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/17_a.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/17_a.... None of the functions operating on sequences are generic, so you cannot create your own type and do a `defmethod` and have them automatically adapt to it. And unlike `print-object` which gets used by format and print and others, there's also no "protocol" (or whatever term you like) generic function you can implement which will make your collection acceptable as a sequence. You could build something like this, and maybe shadow the standard functions so that it's not a new set of functions from a user perspective, but it's a notable absence in a language with a rich OO system through CLOS. It makes sense that it wasn't in the original spec, but I still think it would have been something that would have been added if the development of CL (as a standard) had continued.

iLemming 3mo ago

> programming has matured quite a bit Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no? Clojure, Clojurescript, Clojure-Dart, Fennel, Jade, Jank, Jolt, Coalton - these are relatively recent (and still developing) languages, and this is just off the top of my head, there are so many more. Lisp is not a programming language (in a sense), it's an idea. It influenced pretty much every single PL we use today and continues to do so. You can't really "level-heatedly" criticize an idea, it's like criticizing I dunno, group theory. You can though debate about merits of a specific implementation of it.

throwaway81523 3mo ago
> Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no? Pretty much. See pg's famous "Blub Paradox" where he sees Lisp as the top of a tower of lesser languages. He doesn't recognize that Lisp might at best be called a limit ordinal, to use math jargon. That is, Lisp is just another Blub, and the Lisp zealots haven't figured that out. You don't necessarily want to keep going further and further up, of course. Lisp still has fascination. But e.g., in Common Lisp (I mean just the stuff in the CL spec, no ad-hoc extensions allowed) you can't write anything resembling an OS. You can in Scheme, using continuations to handle process switching. Going further up, Lisp doesn't make it easy to ensure the absence of particular behaviours in a program, what TAPL calls the purpose of a type system. Tony Morrison has a semi-realistic example of what static types can get you: http://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-design-static-typing-and-functional-programming/ http://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-de... Link still works but TLS certificate expired in 2025, tsk tsk.
- hajile 3mo ago
  Your lisp criticism is orthogonal to the idea of lisp itself. Lisps like Coalton (lambda calculus) or Shen (sequent calculus) are strongly typed. AI is an interesting point too where being closer to a raw AST is likely an advantage because it can focus more on the semantics instead of the syntax.
  - 3mo ago

throwaway81523 3mo ago

I mentioned this already but you might like: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....

vaylian 3mo ago

The lisp curse: https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

tug2024 3mo ago
[dead]

pjc50 3mo ago

There seems to be a Lisp .. handedness? Certain people seem to find it mentally appealing. I would liken it to one of the really niche music genres. Only a small number of people like it, but they do so very intensely. The Stockhausen of programming. That's basically all it is. A fandom. A remarkably enduring one, but not one which has ever broken out, and therefore is unlikely to ever do so. Now in an even worse position: if you are armed with an LLM and therefore uninterested in the code itself, why on earth would you direct it to write in Lisp?