9 ms·

A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

68 points by llambda 13y ago

betterunix 13y ago
I am not sure it is true that comp.lang.lisp barely tolerates newbies. I have posted there on several occasions and when I say something wrong, I am politely corrected. I have seen a lot of less experienced programmers come there, ask an obviously beginner question, and get helpful answers. Reading through the past few days of posts, I can see a few beginner questions which all received helpful answers. The problem in comp.lang.lisp is the number of trolls -- in other words, the universal problem on Usenet. People come in trying to prove that some other language is superior, or asking questions like "If Lisp is so great why is nobody using it?"
- LanceH 13y ago
  It has been absolutely years, but I recall they didn't like homework problems. This made it really difficult to ask newb questions.
  - serf 13y ago
    homework problems are different than newbie problems.. a homework problem is a problem you're charged with solving so as to reinforce elements and critical thinking from the chapter or segment of teaching that you experienced before the problem. Very few homework problems are given that cannot be solved by the user, if they paid attention to the work. There is a very thin line between someone trying to crowd-source their homework to a programming forum, and actually asking for help. This can usually be determined by how the question is asked. Example: "How do I write this..?" is not as respectable a question as "I am writing this, i'm this far and I ran into this problem, can anyone help me to understand my problem?" a newbie problem is a problem generated through normal use of a language to achieve a goal, in which the language user ( the newbie ) lacks the personal experience to conquer some goal post standing between him and his reason for writing what he/she's writing. Example : "I'm coming from such and such a language where we can do this... ... will this ... work the same in CL?" or "This piece of code behaves in this way ... can anyone help me work through as to why it does this?" The problem (that people have) with the lisp community is that they tend to be highly sensitive in regards to hand-holding, and can usually sniff out homework problems with relative ease.
fusiongyro 13y ago
There isn't, as far as I'm aware, another language with CL's popularity that provides either its condition system or the full power of the CLOS (method combination, for instance). These two major subsystems are still significant improvements over what modern languages have to offer.
- hga 13y ago
  Good point about CLOS, but for a lot of us who've gained an allergy to OO over the years, especially in its difficult relation to functional programming, that's of limited appeal unless you're working in one of the areas its fruitfully employed. Would have to look at it's condition system, it's been way too long.
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    If you're giving up CL for Ruby, the CLOS is worth discussing. If you're giving up CL for Haskell, well, it's a different story. :) I never used the condition system extensively (or CL) but my recollection is that when you raise the condition you can also furnish various recovery strategies to be selected by the handler. If the caller doesn't handle, it will travel up the stack to someone who does, but that entity is not limited to innovating its own handling strategy, it can also choose one of the provided ones without breaking the abstraction or involving intermediate callers. The toplevel handler shows the provided restarts, adds the retry/fail options and lets the user interactively select one. It's pretty sophisticated.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    CLOS is, IMO, much closer to an inheritable Rust trait than C++.
  - Theriac25 13y ago
    Have you really looked into CLOS? Because IMHO it doesn't have much common with any of the OO systems in any of the mainstream languages.
    - hga 13y ago
protomyth 13y ago
Perhaps the author will find the answer to the "why" of how unwelcoming a community can be in his choice of opening paragraphs. A story that calls some number of his audience as stupid[1] or ignorant[2] for holding a belief is probably not the best way to introduce your soul searching on why the community he was a part of is not a welcoming one. 1) the implication if you have read your holy book and still believe then you are a poor thinker. 2) if we were in the Middle Ages, the story might be more relevant. I do believe most believers of any religion in the modern era have probably read their own holy book.
- breckinloggins 13y ago
  Coming from the Bible Belt, I can assure you that point 2 is absolutely false. That said, even as a non-Christian I was also uncomfortable with that as an introduction. I'm sure many Lispers are of the opinion that almost 100% of their peers are atheists or other "nones", but that's (I suspect) more a function of geography than language choice. It's unwise to turn off what could be a significant portion of your readers in the first paragraph!
  - hga 13y ago
    Indeed, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This author has told us up front attracting people to LISP/Clojure is not his primary goal. There's also the minor detail that if you're a Christian the really canon stuff is in the New Testament, a lot if not most of the problematic stuff is in the Old Testament and not longer strictly applies (surely most of us remember "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"???), so I suspect the whole premise is false.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      Well, certainly the procedure for going to the bathroom is a bit different in modern times[1], and what parts of the Old Testament is a matter of debate between branches of Christians. Heck, the english translation of "thou shalt not (murder|kill)" is a bit of a thing. By the time you get out of bible school and listen to the sermons, you have gone through the whole bible[2]. I just found it very tone deaf to open with that kind of story when it basically has the same effect as what he is complaining about. Its just odd. 1) Although if you happen to hit a disaster, reviewing a bit of the health guidelines in Leviticus couldn't hurt. It will also probably help if you remember a lot of it is basic how-not-to-die health guidelines. 2) I came from the Catholic and 7th Day Adv family (yeah, not exactly the most agreeable to mix), and both seem to have gone through the whole thing. Plus, they have a bit of disagreement as to what constitutes the whole thing. Luther did a bit of pruning.
breckinloggins 13y ago
I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space: - Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement. - Base FFI and code gen on more abstractions so that Clojure living in a .net world or a C/C++ world or a Python world would feel just as cozy as Clojure living on the JVM. Rich Hickey talked about why he abandoned primary CLR support early on. He said he "didn't want to keep writing everything twice". This was probably the best strategy at first, but now one hopes that with ClojureScript + Clojure enough has been learned to discover more ways to factor out the commonalities so that Clojure is more easily retargetable. - Speaking of targets: there should be a first class, fully supported Clojure frontend to LLVM. There are research projects and personal projects in this area, but that's about it. I'd like to see an official LLVM target. - Introduce or surface more abstractions and macros such that the immutability and pure functional underpinnings could be extended, removed, or replaced. This is likely to be the most controversial change, but it would be essential to the possibility of Clojure running on small embedded systems and other environments where the choice of underlying data structures and concurrency algorithms can't come baked in. This is mostly done already (as most things in Clojure are built on top of abstractions), but it still needs a deep look. - Open up the reader. A Lisp without full reader macros is unlikely to win over all potential converts, not because reader macros are this incredibly common thing, but because the personality of most Lisp hackers tends to thinking like "well I don't think I'll need a reader macro, but why would I want a language that won't even give me the option?"
- hga 13y ago
  Strong caveat about LLVM: it's not a good target for precise garbage collection, at a certain point the distinction between pointers and integers is lost. Fixing that would require diving into and writing a lot of C++, and I'd rather do that sort of work with a safe pointer language or drop all pretenses for the lowest level stuff.
  - breckinloggins 13y ago
tom_b 13y ago
As someone who learned a little Lisp in the last few years, I think there is a good collection of books available for the newbie who wants to learn. For Common Lisp, Land of Lisp, Practical Common Lisp, and Ansi Common Lisp all seem good enough to get hacking quickly. Thinking about community effects, I'm not as convinced a community represents a gating factor for hackers. I attend the occasional Clojure meetup (and Clojure/Conj for that matter). The meetups in my area are well-attended and run, although they could be improved with a better introduction and ice-breaker for more introverted attendees (yes, I've just outed my personality type). But from an opportunity mindset, the Clojure community seems to have done an admirable job getting the message out. Multiple good books, the Clojure/conj, and a well-attended meetup in my area all make me feel like I may not only stretch myself and learn new programming techniques, but that I have some hope of advocating for Clojure in my workplace or, good grief, applying for an actual day job where I would use Clojure. It's unclear to me that Common Lisp can offer that.
- 3838 13y ago
  might need to pick your icebreaker with care - some can be downright painful though "tell us your name, where you're from and one nice thing that happened to you this week" is a non-demanding one
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  Those are all good books, I'd also recommend Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing.
- Adrock 13y ago
  Hi tom_b, I'm one of the co-organizers of the NYC Clojure meetup. I don't know if that's the one you attend, but I'm definitely interested in any specific ideas you might have for better introductions and ice breakers.
  - tom_b 13y ago
    Thanks for organizing a Clojure meetup, it is much appreciated. My only recommendations are quite generic - for smaller meetups, make sure a group introduction is on the agenda and actually happens. Might be nice if there were easy ways to become more active in the group, but this is hard for the meetup/talk format. I'm definitely not being critical though - I feel lucky enough to have a Clojure meetup happen in my general area. Mostly it falls back on me, as an interested-in-the-community hacker to find a way actually be social and integrate myself into that group.
adestefan 13y ago
Is this not just another point in a decades long quest to save LISP? Maybe LISP doesn't need saved? Maybe it's okay that a language isn't popular? Maybe It's okay that a language isn't hip? Maybe it's okay if a language doesn't have the latest gee wiz social status? The fact that people keep trying to save LISP every 4 or 5 years could mean it's perfectly fine how it is. I don't see people trying to save the COBOL, or FORTRAN, or <insert favorite esoteric language here> community.
- hga 13y ago
  Maybe ... prior to the R6RS debacle I had my hopes on Scheme, but it's still digging itself out of that mess, plus the long term failure to advance from R5RS that prompted the process change. Common Lisp has had 3 decades to get its act together and is an abject failure in my view, plus it's got a half century of accumulated backwards compatibility accreted messiness. Clojure is not a LISP, as in LISt Processing is not its alpha and omega. For now I won't go into details on I think it's being so successful, expect to point out that its architect has exquisite taste and savvy pragmatism, has made some great innovations in e.g. making maps and vectors syntactically first class citizens, and of course if you like serious functional programming and/or multi-core SMP/ccNUMA programming is has a great story. And most of all it's developed an ecosystem that has left Common Lisp and Scheme in the dust. BTW, I don't think anyone needs to "save" COBOL, it's still used a lot, and as I understand it FORTRAN is still going strong in its niche, with regular new standard. Either are very far from being esoteric languages, although COBOL action is mostly hidden in the IT departments of organizations that write and maintain their custom systems.
  - mrottenkolber 13y ago
    Am I the only one who thinks Clojure is extremely ugly, especially compared to CL? I work a lot with clojure, and it reminds me a lot of when I was forced a hack ruby. There is this guy, or even a group of people, who get caught up in the glamourous idea of reinventing programming. They then jerk their favourite features and design artifacts into a language. The main point of the design seems to be being able to express the thing in fancy words. Some people love that stuff, they think its beauty and good design because it's somewhat consistent (usually not after the second glance). I think good design is whats works, and what has evolved due to the needs of practicioners. And that is the beauty of CL, it's shaped by evolution and consensus, not by some vison. Edit: Also, ever taken into account, that CL is maybe simply good enough? Every possble feature can be included by libraries. There is no need for an updated CL, what we need is more standards like bordeaux-threads, usocket, closer-mop...
wes-exp 13y ago
Should be tagged [2012]. Rubyist briefly falls in love with CL, then falls out of love. News at 11.
cageface 13y ago
I came to precisely the same realization about ten years ago, after struggling in vain with the culture and quirks of Common Lisp. There's no question that learning Lisp in some form will make you a better programmer but don't get caught up in the cult that surrounds it. Virtually all of Lisp's innovations now been validated and adopted by more mainstream languages and the fact that nobody has picked up the s-expr syntax is telling. These days I focus more on writing useful code and making end users happy and I've found that to be much more satisfying than wringing my hands over the inelegance of everyday languages.
stephenpiment 13y ago
Honestly, I don't know that CL was ever exactly beloved among Lispers. (Scheme may fit that description better). CL was a pragmatic construct from the beginning, responding to many conflicting demands.
outworlder 13y ago
Props to the author for mentioning Chicken Scheme. The community is very friendly indeed. There are lots of eggs and the easy C integration means that one is not usually left wanting for libraries, assuming a minimal knowledge of C. Also, it runs basically anywhere. One could embed it inside an iPhone app, for instance. There are some big things missing still. There is no standard database access library, or an equivalent to Python's WSGI (or Ruby's Rack). Or MongoDB drivers (that's my fault, I promised the community one a couple of months ago). There's also some missing tooling. Better debugging support, for instance. That's mostly avoided by the use of unit tests and the REPL, but is occasionally required. Or profilers. Or code coverage tools. Due to the fact that everything is compiled to C, there are some tools that may be used, but it is still not ideal.
agentultra 13y ago
First there are a lot of programmers who come to CL to debate. They read, they study, and then they complain. I've sat in #lisp since about 2007/8 and there have been numerous nicks that show up just to ask a few rather philosophical questions and debate the merits and technical decisions that went into CL. They usually end up leaving and writing blog posts about how terrible a language CL is and how caustic the community is. There isn't a problem with the CL community. There's a problem with the culture surrounding CL that seems to attract trolls. Newbies get answers to genuine questions. I've received a great deal of help over the years from experience CL programmers. Anything from beginner questions to code reviews of various snippets I've been working on. I have received a lot of great advice over the years that has helped me tremendously. And I've seen other newcomers receive the same treatment as well. If you arrive in #lisp of c.l.l and have a genuine question about a problem you are stuck on you will likely attract someone willing to help you. It's a small community but it is friendly. Second, CL was in the end designed to outlive itself. You get full programmatic access to the compiler and reader. It is trivial to add any feature a modern programmer may require that wasn't accounted for in the original specification. CLUEL could certainly have been useful if the author had finished it and put it out into the wild (maybe waiting until it was finished was the wrong choice). I think if you are genuinely interested in learning CL you need to check your ego at the door, so to speak, and just start from scratch. Write programs that solve yours or your users' problems and ask questions in #lisp and on c.l.l if you get stuck. There is a wealth of great literature, papers, tools, and a small, friendly community to help you. Edit: I meant to note that the reason the specification hasn't been updated, afaik, is because it doesn't have to be updated. All the tools you need to add the features you require are there in the spec. You can make it into the language you need.
- pavelludiq 13y ago
  Completely agree. One thing that I figured out rather quickly is that lispers really want to teach and explain things, but being lazy programmers, they don't bother holding your hand, so if you are willing to do your homework, you'll have an amazing time with lisp. Lets take a look at a few patterns I've noticed: * Newbie posts some snippet and asks for review, the snippet is C++ code written in CL, lisper tells him it sucks, newbie explains that he has a lot of C++ experience and this is how his brain works. Lispers(now plural) explain to him that lisp must be learned with a beginners mind and he must forget C++ temporarily in order to learn it properly. Newbie gets insulted for some reason and begins arguing. * newbie asks question about "generic lisp", lispers explain that the question makes no sense, and give his an answer about common lisp. Newbie asks question again emphasizing that he isn't interested in Common Lisp but in lisp in general, lispers tell him to read the topic, #lisp is about Common Lisp. Newbie argues that #lisp should be about generic lisp, and #commonlisp or whatever should be about CL, argument goes nowhere of course. * newbie asks question and posts snippet. The code is obviously written by somebody with exactly 1 hour of lisp experience(parens are mismatched and aligned wrong, indentation is horrible, not to mention the obvious hacks). lispers explain that lisp is best learned patiently and not through the "learn x in y minutes" way, and that he should read Practical Common Lisp. Newbie gets insulted he was told to RTFM instead of getting an actual answer to his "wrong" question(at least in the eyes of us lispers). * newbie asks about scheme/emacs and refuses to accept that #lisp isn't about those languages, see pattern #2. * newbie asks scheme vs CL vs clojure vs haskell vs python vs ... question. Gets surprised when lispers unapologetically proclaim CL the best language ever and everything else is shit. Lispers do not hide their bias. Newbie then begins to argue about his favorite language and why it is better than lisp. Sometimes it's clojure, sometimes its scheme, or it could be whatever. * (my favorite, and probably most frequent) Newbie asks what is lisp good for, gets pissed off when we tell him we program computers with it :) Many other such questions include: Q: "why isn't lisp popular" A: You haven't converted enough people to it :) Q: "Why does lisp have so few libraries" A: You haven't written enough libraries yet :) Q: "Why isn't there a library for X" A: Nobody needed it, if you do, write it and push it to github :) Q: "Why doesn't library X do Y" A: patches welcome. Notice a pattern :) All of these cases or variations of them have happened many times since I started to frequent #lisp, often times the word "fags" or "cunts" get used, and not by lispers.
pnathan 13y ago
This is a strange article. Let's address his complaints in two basic areas: 1. Community. The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be remarkably acerbic to the point of toxic, depending on who feels like contributing at the time. Part of this are the annoying trolls that show up; one's patience wears thin. A FAQ document might go a ways. However, there are a large number of people who don't ream newbies out and really are helpful. lispm here on HN is one of the friendliest Lispers out there and actually has helped me out tons. Addendum: r/lisp on Reddit is good for generalish Lisp questions. StackOverflow's common lisp tag almost always gets an answer to most any reasonable question. sbcl-devel mailing list is useful if you want to take the time to posit in-depth technical questions to the SBCL developers. Lispforum, oddly enough, I haven't used much. I simply don't go there much. I should, I suppose. :) 2. Technical. I can do no better than quote my /r/lisp post on this (r/lisp is really good for lisp help). --- First of all, consistency. A variety of things are peculiar in how they are named. TERPRI? Really? Second, Common Lisp is a (the?) programmable programming language. CLUEL-esque platforms could be used to drive CDR adoption and cleanups of the original language. My primary gripes with CL are the lack of CDR-2, lack of CDR-8, the lack of hierarchical namespaces, the funky naming conventions & expectations[1], and the lack of deeper CLOS integration[2]. [1] ELT vs AREF vs NTH, for instance. Or, LOOP for lists vs arrays vs (your data structure here). [2] See CDR-8.
jff 13y ago
This reminds me of my experiences with Plan 9. A very cool system, but it's managed to attract some of the absolute worst people in computing. Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. In the end, I just gave up. We tried to drag things kicking and screaming into the 21st century with source control, 64 bit kernel, automated builds and testing, etc. but nobody wanted it. On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide"
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bitwize 13y ago
  Maybe this: On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide" and this: Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. are related?
avodonosov 13y ago
heresy
baddox 13y ago
> the surest way for a Christian to lose their faith is to read the Bible, cover to cover. I doubt that, based on my observation of a strong correlation between intense academic study of the Bible and fortitude of Christian faith.

68 points by llambda 13y ago

I am not sure it is true that comp.lang.lisp barely tolerates newbies. I have posted there on several occasions and when I say something wrong, I am politely corrected. I have seen a lot of less experienced programmers come there, ask an obviously beginner question, and get helpful answers. Reading through the past few days of posts, I can see a few beginner questions which all received helpful answers. The problem in comp.lang.lisp is the number of trolls -- in other words, the universal problem on Usenet. People come in trying to prove that some other language is superior, or asking questions like "If Lisp is so great why is nobody using it?"

LanceH 13y ago
It has been absolutely years, but I recall they didn't like homework problems. This made it really difficult to ask newb questions.
- serf 13y ago
  homework problems are different than newbie problems.. a homework problem is a problem you're charged with solving so as to reinforce elements and critical thinking from the chapter or segment of teaching that you experienced before the problem. Very few homework problems are given that cannot be solved by the user, if they paid attention to the work. There is a very thin line between someone trying to crowd-source their homework to a programming forum, and actually asking for help. This can usually be determined by how the question is asked. Example: "How do I write this..?" is not as respectable a question as "I am writing this, i'm this far and I ran into this problem, can anyone help me to understand my problem?" a newbie problem is a problem generated through normal use of a language to achieve a goal, in which the language user ( the newbie ) lacks the personal experience to conquer some goal post standing between him and his reason for writing what he/she's writing. Example : "I'm coming from such and such a language where we can do this... ... will this ... work the same in CL?" or "This piece of code behaves in this way ... can anyone help me work through as to why it does this?" The problem (that people have) with the lisp community is that they tend to be highly sensitive in regards to hand-holding, and can usually sniff out homework problems with relative ease.

fusiongyro 13y ago

There isn't, as far as I'm aware, another language with CL's popularity that provides either its condition system or the full power of the CLOS (method combination, for instance). These two major subsystems are still significant improvements over what modern languages have to offer.

hga 13y ago
Good point about CLOS, but for a lot of us who've gained an allergy to OO over the years, especially in its difficult relation to functional programming, that's of limited appeal unless you're working in one of the areas its fruitfully employed. Would have to look at it's condition system, it's been way too long.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  If you're giving up CL for Ruby, the CLOS is worth discussing. If you're giving up CL for Haskell, well, it's a different story. :) I never used the condition system extensively (or CL) but my recollection is that when you raise the condition you can also furnish various recovery strategies to be selected by the handler. If the caller doesn't handle, it will travel up the stack to someone who does, but that entity is not limited to innovating its own handling strategy, it can also choose one of the provided ones without breaking the abstraction or involving intermediate callers. The toplevel handler shows the provided restarts, adds the retry/fail options and lets the user interactively select one. It's pretty sophisticated.
- pnathan 13y ago
  CLOS is, IMO, much closer to an inheritable Rust trait than C++.
- Theriac25 13y ago
  Have you really looked into CLOS? Because IMHO it doesn't have much common with any of the OO systems in any of the mainstream languages.
  - hga 13y ago

protomyth 13y ago

Perhaps the author will find the answer to the "why" of how unwelcoming a community can be in his choice of opening paragraphs. A story that calls some number of his audience as stupid[1] or ignorant[2] for holding a belief is probably not the best way to introduce your soul searching on why the community he was a part of is not a welcoming one. 1) the implication if you have read your holy book and still believe then you are a poor thinker. 2) if we were in the Middle Ages, the story might be more relevant. I do believe most believers of any religion in the modern era have probably read their own holy book.

breckinloggins 13y ago
Coming from the Bible Belt, I can assure you that point 2 is absolutely false. That said, even as a non-Christian I was also uncomfortable with that as an introduction. I'm sure many Lispers are of the opinion that almost 100% of their peers are atheists or other "nones", but that's (I suspect) more a function of geography than language choice. It's unwise to turn off what could be a significant portion of your readers in the first paragraph!
- hga 13y ago
  Indeed, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This author has told us up front attracting people to LISP/Clojure is not his primary goal. There's also the minor detail that if you're a Christian the really canon stuff is in the New Testament, a lot if not most of the problematic stuff is in the Old Testament and not longer strictly applies (surely most of us remember "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"???), so I suspect the whole premise is false.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Well, certainly the procedure for going to the bathroom is a bit different in modern times[1], and what parts of the Old Testament is a matter of debate between branches of Christians. Heck, the english translation of "thou shalt not (murder|kill)" is a bit of a thing. By the time you get out of bible school and listen to the sermons, you have gone through the whole bible[2]. I just found it very tone deaf to open with that kind of story when it basically has the same effect as what he is complaining about. Its just odd. 1) Although if you happen to hit a disaster, reviewing a bit of the health guidelines in Leviticus couldn't hurt. It will also probably help if you remember a lot of it is basic how-not-to-die health guidelines. 2) I came from the Catholic and 7th Day Adv family (yeah, not exactly the most agreeable to mix), and both seem to have gone through the whole thing. Plus, they have a bit of disagreement as to what constitutes the whole thing. Luther did a bit of pruning.

breckinloggins 13y ago

I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space: - Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement. - Base FFI and code gen on more abstractions so that Clojure living in a .net world or a C/C++ world or a Python world would feel just as cozy as Clojure living on the JVM. Rich Hickey talked about why he abandoned primary CLR support early on. He said he "didn't want to keep writing everything twice". This was probably the best strategy at first, but now one hopes that with ClojureScript + Clojure enough has been learned to discover more ways to factor out the commonalities so that Clojure is more easily retargetable. - Speaking of targets: there should be a first class, fully supported Clojure frontend to LLVM. There are research projects and personal projects in this area, but that's about it. I'd like to see an official LLVM target. - Introduce or surface more abstractions and macros such that the immutability and pure functional underpinnings could be extended, removed, or replaced. This is likely to be the most controversial change, but it would be essential to the possibility of Clojure running on small embedded systems and other environments where the choice of underlying data structures and concurrency algorithms can't come baked in. This is mostly done already (as most things in Clojure are built on top of abstractions), but it still needs a deep look. - Open up the reader. A Lisp without full reader macros is unlikely to win over all potential converts, not because reader macros are this incredibly common thing, but because the personality of most Lisp hackers tends to thinking like "well I don't think I'll need a reader macro, but why would I want a language that won't even give me the option?"

hga 13y ago
Strong caveat about LLVM: it's not a good target for precise garbage collection, at a certain point the distinction between pointers and integers is lost. Fixing that would require diving into and writing a lot of C++, and I'd rather do that sort of work with a safe pointer language or drop all pretenses for the lowest level stuff.
- breckinloggins 13y ago

tom_b 13y ago

As someone who learned a little Lisp in the last few years, I think there is a good collection of books available for the newbie who wants to learn. For Common Lisp, Land of Lisp, Practical Common Lisp, and Ansi Common Lisp all seem good enough to get hacking quickly. Thinking about community effects, I'm not as convinced a community represents a gating factor for hackers. I attend the occasional Clojure meetup (and Clojure/Conj for that matter). The meetups in my area are well-attended and run, although they could be improved with a better introduction and ice-breaker for more introverted attendees (yes, I've just outed my personality type). But from an opportunity mindset, the Clojure community seems to have done an admirable job getting the message out. Multiple good books, the Clojure/conj, and a well-attended meetup in my area all make me feel like I may not only stretch myself and learn new programming techniques, but that I have some hope of advocating for Clojure in my workplace or, good grief, applying for an actual day job where I would use Clojure. It's unclear to me that Common Lisp can offer that.

3838 13y ago
might need to pick your icebreaker with care - some can be downright painful though "tell us your name, where you're from and one nice thing that happened to you this week" is a non-demanding one
6d0debc071 13y ago
Those are all good books, I'd also recommend Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing.
Adrock 13y ago
Hi tom_b, I'm one of the co-organizers of the NYC Clojure meetup. I don't know if that's the one you attend, but I'm definitely interested in any specific ideas you might have for better introductions and ice breakers.
- tom_b 13y ago
  Thanks for organizing a Clojure meetup, it is much appreciated. My only recommendations are quite generic - for smaller meetups, make sure a group introduction is on the agenda and actually happens. Might be nice if there were easy ways to become more active in the group, but this is hard for the meetup/talk format. I'm definitely not being critical though - I feel lucky enough to have a Clojure meetup happen in my general area. Mostly it falls back on me, as an interested-in-the-community hacker to find a way actually be social and integrate myself into that group.

adestefan 13y ago

Is this not just another point in a decades long quest to save LISP? Maybe LISP doesn't need saved? Maybe it's okay that a language isn't popular? Maybe It's okay that a language isn't hip? Maybe it's okay if a language doesn't have the latest gee wiz social status? The fact that people keep trying to save LISP every 4 or 5 years could mean it's perfectly fine how it is. I don't see people trying to save the COBOL, or FORTRAN, or <insert favorite esoteric language here> community.

hga 13y ago
Maybe ... prior to the R6RS debacle I had my hopes on Scheme, but it's still digging itself out of that mess, plus the long term failure to advance from R5RS that prompted the process change. Common Lisp has had 3 decades to get its act together and is an abject failure in my view, plus it's got a half century of accumulated backwards compatibility accreted messiness. Clojure is not a LISP, as in LISt Processing is not its alpha and omega. For now I won't go into details on I think it's being so successful, expect to point out that its architect has exquisite taste and savvy pragmatism, has made some great innovations in e.g. making maps and vectors syntactically first class citizens, and of course if you like serious functional programming and/or multi-core SMP/ccNUMA programming is has a great story. And most of all it's developed an ecosystem that has left Common Lisp and Scheme in the dust. BTW, I don't think anyone needs to "save" COBOL, it's still used a lot, and as I understand it FORTRAN is still going strong in its niche, with regular new standard. Either are very far from being esoteric languages, although COBOL action is mostly hidden in the IT departments of organizations that write and maintain their custom systems.
- mrottenkolber 13y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks Clojure is extremely ugly, especially compared to CL? I work a lot with clojure, and it reminds me a lot of when I was forced a hack ruby. There is this guy, or even a group of people, who get caught up in the glamourous idea of reinventing programming. They then jerk their favourite features and design artifacts into a language. The main point of the design seems to be being able to express the thing in fancy words. Some people love that stuff, they think its beauty and good design because it's somewhat consistent (usually not after the second glance). I think good design is whats works, and what has evolved due to the needs of practicioners. And that is the beauty of CL, it's shaped by evolution and consensus, not by some vison. Edit: Also, ever taken into account, that CL is maybe simply good enough? Every possble feature can be included by libraries. There is no need for an updated CL, what we need is more standards like bordeaux-threads, usocket, closer-mop...

wes-exp 13y ago

Should be tagged [2012]. Rubyist briefly falls in love with CL, then falls out of love. News at 11.

cageface 13y ago

I came to precisely the same realization about ten years ago, after struggling in vain with the culture and quirks of Common Lisp. There's no question that learning Lisp in some form will make you a better programmer but don't get caught up in the cult that surrounds it. Virtually all of Lisp's innovations now been validated and adopted by more mainstream languages and the fact that nobody has picked up the s-expr syntax is telling. These days I focus more on writing useful code and making end users happy and I've found that to be much more satisfying than wringing my hands over the inelegance of everyday languages.

stephenpiment 13y ago

Honestly, I don't know that CL was ever exactly beloved among Lispers. (Scheme may fit that description better). CL was a pragmatic construct from the beginning, responding to many conflicting demands.

outworlder 13y ago

Props to the author for mentioning Chicken Scheme. The community is very friendly indeed. There are lots of eggs and the easy C integration means that one is not usually left wanting for libraries, assuming a minimal knowledge of C. Also, it runs basically anywhere. One could embed it inside an iPhone app, for instance. There are some big things missing still. There is no standard database access library, or an equivalent to Python's WSGI (or Ruby's Rack). Or MongoDB drivers (that's my fault, I promised the community one a couple of months ago). There's also some missing tooling. Better debugging support, for instance. That's mostly avoided by the use of unit tests and the REPL, but is occasionally required. Or profilers. Or code coverage tools. Due to the fact that everything is compiled to C, there are some tools that may be used, but it is still not ideal.

agentultra 13y ago

First there are a lot of programmers who come to CL to debate. They read, they study, and then they complain. I've sat in #lisp since about 2007/8 and there have been numerous nicks that show up just to ask a few rather philosophical questions and debate the merits and technical decisions that went into CL. They usually end up leaving and writing blog posts about how terrible a language CL is and how caustic the community is. There isn't a problem with the CL community. There's a problem with the culture surrounding CL that seems to attract trolls. Newbies get answers to genuine questions. I've received a great deal of help over the years from experience CL programmers. Anything from beginner questions to code reviews of various snippets I've been working on. I have received a lot of great advice over the years that has helped me tremendously. And I've seen other newcomers receive the same treatment as well. If you arrive in #lisp of c.l.l and have a genuine question about a problem you are stuck on you will likely attract someone willing to help you. It's a small community but it is friendly. Second, CL was in the end designed to outlive itself. You get full programmatic access to the compiler and reader. It is trivial to add any feature a modern programmer may require that wasn't accounted for in the original specification. CLUEL could certainly have been useful if the author had finished it and put it out into the wild (maybe waiting until it was finished was the wrong choice). I think if you are genuinely interested in learning CL you need to check your ego at the door, so to speak, and just start from scratch. Write programs that solve yours or your users' problems and ask questions in #lisp and on c.l.l if you get stuck. There is a wealth of great literature, papers, tools, and a small, friendly community to help you. Edit: I meant to note that the reason the specification hasn't been updated, afaik, is because it doesn't have to be updated. All the tools you need to add the features you require are there in the spec. You can make it into the language you need.

pavelludiq 13y ago
Completely agree. One thing that I figured out rather quickly is that lispers really want to teach and explain things, but being lazy programmers, they don't bother holding your hand, so if you are willing to do your homework, you'll have an amazing time with lisp. Lets take a look at a few patterns I've noticed: * Newbie posts some snippet and asks for review, the snippet is C++ code written in CL, lisper tells him it sucks, newbie explains that he has a lot of C++ experience and this is how his brain works. Lispers(now plural) explain to him that lisp must be learned with a beginners mind and he must forget C++ temporarily in order to learn it properly. Newbie gets insulted for some reason and begins arguing. * newbie asks question about "generic lisp", lispers explain that the question makes no sense, and give his an answer about common lisp. Newbie asks question again emphasizing that he isn't interested in Common Lisp but in lisp in general, lispers tell him to read the topic, #lisp is about Common Lisp. Newbie argues that #lisp should be about generic lisp, and #commonlisp or whatever should be about CL, argument goes nowhere of course. * newbie asks question and posts snippet. The code is obviously written by somebody with exactly 1 hour of lisp experience(parens are mismatched and aligned wrong, indentation is horrible, not to mention the obvious hacks). lispers explain that lisp is best learned patiently and not through the "learn x in y minutes" way, and that he should read Practical Common Lisp. Newbie gets insulted he was told to RTFM instead of getting an actual answer to his "wrong" question(at least in the eyes of us lispers). * newbie asks about scheme/emacs and refuses to accept that #lisp isn't about those languages, see pattern #2. * newbie asks scheme vs CL vs clojure vs haskell vs python vs ... question. Gets surprised when lispers unapologetically proclaim CL the best language ever and everything else is shit. Lispers do not hide their bias. Newbie then begins to argue about his favorite language and why it is better than lisp. Sometimes it's clojure, sometimes its scheme, or it could be whatever. * (my favorite, and probably most frequent) Newbie asks what is lisp good for, gets pissed off when we tell him we program computers with it :) Many other such questions include: Q: "why isn't lisp popular" A: You haven't converted enough people to it :) Q: "Why does lisp have so few libraries" A: You haven't written enough libraries yet :) Q: "Why isn't there a library for X" A: Nobody needed it, if you do, write it and push it to github :) Q: "Why doesn't library X do Y" A: patches welcome. Notice a pattern :) All of these cases or variations of them have happened many times since I started to frequent #lisp, often times the word "fags" or "cunts" get used, and not by lispers.

pnathan 13y ago

This is a strange article. Let's address his complaints in two basic areas: 1. Community. The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be remarkably acerbic to the point of toxic, depending on who feels like contributing at the time. Part of this are the annoying trolls that show up; one's patience wears thin. A FAQ document might go a ways. However, there are a large number of people who don't ream newbies out and really are helpful. lispm here on HN is one of the friendliest Lispers out there and actually has helped me out tons. Addendum: r/lisp on Reddit is good for generalish Lisp questions. StackOverflow's common lisp tag almost always gets an answer to most any reasonable question. sbcl-devel mailing list is useful if you want to take the time to posit in-depth technical questions to the SBCL developers. Lispforum, oddly enough, I haven't used much. I simply don't go there much. I should, I suppose. :) 2. Technical. I can do no better than quote my /r/lisp post on this (r/lisp is really good for lisp help). --- First of all, consistency. A variety of things are peculiar in how they are named. TERPRI? Really? Second, Common Lisp is a (the?) programmable programming language. CLUEL-esque platforms could be used to drive CDR adoption and cleanups of the original language. My primary gripes with CL are the lack of CDR-2, lack of CDR-8, the lack of hierarchical namespaces, the funky naming conventions & expectations[1], and the lack of deeper CLOS integration[2]. [1] ELT vs AREF vs NTH, for instance. Or, LOOP for lists vs arrays vs (your data structure here). [2] See CDR-8.

jff 13y ago

This reminds me of my experiences with Plan 9. A very cool system, but it's managed to attract some of the absolute worst people in computing. Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. In the end, I just gave up. We tried to drag things kicking and screaming into the 21st century with source control, 64 bit kernel, automated builds and testing, etc. but nobody wanted it. On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide"

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bitwize 13y ago
Maybe this: On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide" and this: Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. are related?

avodonosov 13y ago

heresy

baddox 13y ago

> the surest way for a Christian to lose their faith is to read the Bible, cover to cover. I doubt that, based on my observation of a strong correlation between intense academic study of the Bible and fortitude of Christian faith.