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> most people program by page faulting As I said, Common Lisp is not for most people. This Web 1.0 page describes the concept: "Teach Yourself Programming in

by lispm 12y ago

> most people program by page faulting As I said, Common Lisp is not for most people. This Web 1.0 page describes the concept: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html > But again the landscape is dominated by FOSS. Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Windows dev tools? Open Source? If you believe in FOSS, you can use SBCL, CMUCL, CLISP, ECL, MKCL, Clozure CL and several others. I use SBCL and Clozure CL. > CD's are more old-school than landlines. Write games with Land of Lisp then. But sorry, the Common Lisp community is not large enough to rewrite books every so often. In the mean time there are classics like Peter Norvig's PAIP, which are even older and even less exciting. Still it is easily one of the best programming books ever written. > Ada were hot Ada was never 'hot'. It is a tool used in a lot of mission critical software. > I mean, what's the case of Common Lisp over Clojure? I think you have to find that out yourself. Don't be sad if Common Lisp is not for you. Few people drive a Mercedes Unimog, though Arnold Schwarzenegger had one. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/09/04/1409847539952_wps_1_EXCLUSIVE_Arnold_Schwarze.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/09/04/1409847539952_wps_... You might ask what the Unimog does better than some Toyota, why it costs so much and why so few people have one. If you might spend some time, you might find out what the Unimog is, why it exists and who uses them for what...

eudox 12y ago
>I think you have to find that out yourself. This won't really do anything to bring people closer to Common Lisp. This is a bad thing btw.
- lispm 12y ago
  Maybe you want to answer the question, why or when one should choose Common Lisp over Clojure. I have not enough knowledge about Clojure to answer that. Thanks.
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  If it means that this brudgers guy stay away thats a really great thing. Seriously reading this thread makes me so happy that we don't attract these douchebags. Edit: friendly fire, sorry
  - eudox 12y ago
    I love Common Lisp[0], that's why I'm trying to improve it. [0] https://github.com/eudoxia0 https://github.com/eudoxia0
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Obviously I would be redundant.
    - mrottenkolber 12y ago
      We indeed have our own trolls...
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Yeah, using words like "douchebags" for other people in the thread reflects great on you and your closed club. Especially since "brudgers" states his case with arguments and politely and has not sweared at anyone.
    - mrottenkolber 12y ago
      Please, he opened up a giant can of strawmen and smeared the CL community because he prefers eBooks, different kind of web design and more marketing. So yes, I consider it douchey to open a completely pointless debate where there could have been a constructive discussion about the strengths of CL.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        One man's "strawmen" are another man's real issues. If you disagree with someone on what the problems are, all he says would look like strawmen. That doesn't warrant a "douchebag" stamp. Plus I don't think the word "douchebag" or "douchey" os appropriate for a discussion among people that are not 17-year olds, 20-yo tops. There are far better adult swear words available if needs be.
        mrottenkolber 12y ago
brudgers 12y ago
There are different ways in which a programming language isn't right for someone. For example, it can be like beef liver. It's not that I don't eat it because of a commitment to vegetarianism. I'm not a vegetarian and I'll gladly eat rare cow on a bun. It's not that I don't believe beef liver is nutritious. I just find eating beef liver an inherently unpleasant experience. It's how I feel whenever I try to use Python [even though it is quite likely more popular than beef liver]. There are also languages which aren't right for me because they don't really fit with what I want to do. Swift for example is only available on the OSX platform and I don't own a Mac. Neither of those apply to Common Lisp. The reason Common Lisp isn't really for me is that there are simply less painful alternatives for the sorts of things I want to do. And one of the ways in which those alternatives are less painful is because of their communities. It's not that language communities shouldn't be opinionated. I listened to DHH talk about Rails in the early days on an older Hansel Minutes podcast. The object is "person" and the table is "people". If that offends someone, then Rails might not be for that person. But the Rails community gets to the point quickly. It lays out the facts and moves forward. Within that community it is not considered acceptable to say, "read this book and these five papers and drop a few thousand on commercial software, and then we might consider you worthy." They tend not to tolerate that. But from the heritage of usenet.comp.lang.lisp that's still considered by some a perfectly entertaining way to treat novice questions in the Common Lisp community. Answering easy questions is dull and being snarky is an outlet for creativity in comparison. In the end, my hypothesis is that programming languages live and die the same way as natural languages, either the community onboards new speakers and the language lives or it doesn't and the language dies [take this as a Kuhn paradigm if you prefer a reference point in science]. C remains vibrant as the language of Unix and its descendants. JavaScript thrives as the language of the web. Pascal and Algol and Simula are less than vibrant or thriving because few people are learning the language. By analogy some members of the Common Lisp community often behave as if it's wrong for babies to babble, that toddlers should learn the alphabet by reading Faulkner, and that only then are they qualified as persons. Norvig's article is about learning programming, not taking ten years to learn a programming language. Contrary to a portion of our dialog, he's a bit language agnostic.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "[even though it is quite likely more popular than beef liver]." It's a total digression, but if you don't restrict your population under consideration beyond "all humans", I would guess that's not the case. Quite a few more people eat cow than program, so even if Python is significantly better liked amongst programmers than liver is amongst cow eaters, there's plenty of room for liver to be "more popular".
mpweiher 12y ago
>> But again the landscape is dominated by FOSS. > Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Xcode the IDE is not. The Clang/LLVM compiler, LLDB debugger and many of the other tools are open source. http://llvm.org http://llvm.org http://clang.llvm.org http://clang.llvm.org
- lispm 12y ago
  The whole development process for Apple's OSX or iOS is not 'free'. Many libraries for OSX or iOS are not free and not open source. Apple's Cocoa is not FOSS, for example.
coldtea 12y ago
>Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Windows dev tools? Open Source? A lot of it is. XCode's compiler, LLVM is FOSS. Microsoft just open sourced large parts of .NET libs and compiler. And there's also Mono, a FOSS implementation of .NET. Plus, even the closed parts, like XCode and Visual Studio, are either free, have totally functional "community editions", or at worse are dirt cheap -- not $4500 to get to professional development. >As I said, Common Lisp is not for most people. You say that as if it's good. It might be a fact, but it sure ain't good. Is there a single good thing that can be argued to come from a language not being popular? I meanbeside BS like "keeps the amateurs away?", which judging by the abundance of amateur Lisp code one sees, is not an actual advantage of Lisp...
- lispm 12y ago
  Richard Stallman is not happy at all about the LLVM FOSS situation: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html > You say that as if it's good. > It might be a fact, but it sure ain't good. Is it bad that not everyone understands Hegel or Heidegger? Does that make their writings less useful? > Is there a single good thing that can be argued to come from a language not being popular? It's not a question of good or bad. It's a fact of life that some things are less popular than others, which says nothing about the usefulness of the tool. > I meanbeside BS like "keeps the amateurs away?", which judging by the abundance of amateur Lisp code one sees, is not an actual advantage of Lisp... It's just that not every programmer has the intellectual capability to understand, master and use Lisp. That's a fact. I've seen that myself countless times at university in beginner's courses. Also many programmers don't need the features Lisp offers and are happy with other approaches. For them Lisp is too complex, too flexible, etc. Lots of people can learn some basic Lisp or simple Lisp dialects. But once they use actual features of Lisp, which allows every user to radically change the language, the things get tough... in the industry stuff like that is not liked. They want tools and developers which are more predictable. I think you should get over this 'popularity' BS.
  - jimbokun 12y ago
    "Is it bad that not everyone understands Hegel or Heidegger? Does that make their writings less useful?" Yes, actually. If they wrote clearly enough so more people could understand their point, their writings would be more useful. The point of writing something is generally to communicate with others, unless it's a personal journal or diary, meant to be kept private. "It's just that not every programmer has the intellectual capability to understand, master and use Lisp. That's a fact. I've seen that myself countless times at university in beginner's courses." Isn't it much more likely that the difficulties are more due to the fact they are beginners, than due to the language used in the course? Did you teach identical material using other languages, and found the students understood the material better? (Honestly curious.) "But once they use actual features of Lisp, which allows every user to radically change the language, the things get tough... in the industry stuff like that is not liked." Meta-programming in Ruby has the same challenges, but there is definitely a strong segment of commercial developers who whole-heartedly embrace those techniques. They didn't just give up and say "Oh well, guess we have to give up and go back to using Java", or adopt some complex about their language being too brilliant for other programmers to ever use. Instead, they put effort into persuading others the expressive power of Ruby is worth the tradeoff with predictability. They don't convince everyone, but they certainly managed to get a lot of developers on their side. I think the Common Lisp community certainly could have accomplished the same thing. There's nothing about the language itself hindering broader adoption, or limiting it's use to academics or elite programmers. It's just the community that seems to want to keep it that way.

by lispm 12y ago

eudox 12y ago

>I think you have to find that out yourself. This won't really do anything to bring people closer to Common Lisp. This is a bad thing btw.

lispm 12y ago
Maybe you want to answer the question, why or when one should choose Common Lisp over Clojure. I have not enough knowledge about Clojure to answer that. Thanks.
mrottenkolber 12y ago
If it means that this brudgers guy stay away thats a really great thing. Seriously reading this thread makes me so happy that we don't attract these douchebags. Edit: friendly fire, sorry
- eudox 12y ago
  I love Common Lisp[0], that's why I'm trying to improve it. [0] https://github.com/eudoxia0 https://github.com/eudoxia0
- brudgers 12y ago
  Obviously I would be redundant.
  - mrottenkolber 12y ago
    We indeed have our own trolls...
- coldtea 12y ago
  Yeah, using words like "douchebags" for other people in the thread reflects great on you and your closed club. Especially since "brudgers" states his case with arguments and politely and has not sweared at anyone.
  - mrottenkolber 12y ago
    Please, he opened up a giant can of strawmen and smeared the CL community because he prefers eBooks, different kind of web design and more marketing. So yes, I consider it douchey to open a completely pointless debate where there could have been a constructive discussion about the strengths of CL.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      One man's "strawmen" are another man's real issues. If you disagree with someone on what the problems are, all he says would look like strawmen. That doesn't warrant a "douchebag" stamp. Plus I don't think the word "douchebag" or "douchey" os appropriate for a discussion among people that are not 17-year olds, 20-yo tops. There are far better adult swear words available if needs be.
      - mrottenkolber 12y ago

brudgers 12y ago

There are different ways in which a programming language isn't right for someone. For example, it can be like beef liver. It's not that I don't eat it because of a commitment to vegetarianism. I'm not a vegetarian and I'll gladly eat rare cow on a bun. It's not that I don't believe beef liver is nutritious. I just find eating beef liver an inherently unpleasant experience. It's how I feel whenever I try to use Python [even though it is quite likely more popular than beef liver]. There are also languages which aren't right for me because they don't really fit with what I want to do. Swift for example is only available on the OSX platform and I don't own a Mac. Neither of those apply to Common Lisp. The reason Common Lisp isn't really for me is that there are simply less painful alternatives for the sorts of things I want to do. And one of the ways in which those alternatives are less painful is because of their communities. It's not that language communities shouldn't be opinionated. I listened to DHH talk about Rails in the early days on an older Hansel Minutes podcast. The object is "person" and the table is "people". If that offends someone, then Rails might not be for that person. But the Rails community gets to the point quickly. It lays out the facts and moves forward. Within that community it is not considered acceptable to say, "read this book and these five papers and drop a few thousand on commercial software, and then we might consider you worthy." They tend not to tolerate that. But from the heritage of usenet.comp.lang.lisp that's still considered by some a perfectly entertaining way to treat novice questions in the Common Lisp community. Answering easy questions is dull and being snarky is an outlet for creativity in comparison. In the end, my hypothesis is that programming languages live and die the same way as natural languages, either the community onboards new speakers and the language lives or it doesn't and the language dies [take this as a Kuhn paradigm if you prefer a reference point in science]. C remains vibrant as the language of Unix and its descendants. JavaScript thrives as the language of the web. Pascal and Algol and Simula are less than vibrant or thriving because few people are learning the language. By analogy some members of the Common Lisp community often behave as if it's wrong for babies to babble, that toddlers should learn the alphabet by reading Faulkner, and that only then are they qualified as persons. Norvig's article is about learning programming, not taking ten years to learn a programming language. Contrary to a portion of our dialog, he's a bit language agnostic.

dllthomas 12y ago
"[even though it is quite likely more popular than beef liver]." It's a total digression, but if you don't restrict your population under consideration beyond "all humans", I would guess that's not the case. Quite a few more people eat cow than program, so even if Python is significantly better liked amongst programmers than liver is amongst cow eaters, there's plenty of room for liver to be "more popular".

mpweiher 12y ago

>> But again the landscape is dominated by FOSS. > Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Xcode the IDE is not. The Clang/LLVM compiler, LLDB debugger and many of the other tools are open source. http://llvm.org http://llvm.org http://clang.llvm.org http://clang.llvm.org

lispm 12y ago
The whole development process for Apple's OSX or iOS is not 'free'. Many libraries for OSX or iOS are not free and not open source. Apple's Cocoa is not FOSS, for example.

coldtea 12y ago

>Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Windows dev tools? Open Source? A lot of it is. XCode's compiler, LLVM is FOSS. Microsoft just open sourced large parts of .NET libs and compiler. And there's also Mono, a FOSS implementation of .NET. Plus, even the closed parts, like XCode and Visual Studio, are either free, have totally functional "community editions", or at worse are dirt cheap -- not $4500 to get to professional development. >As I said, Common Lisp is not for most people. You say that as if it's good. It might be a fact, but it sure ain't good. Is there a single good thing that can be argued to come from a language not being popular? I meanbeside BS like "keeps the amateurs away?", which judging by the abundance of amateur Lisp code one sees, is not an actual advantage of Lisp...

lispm 12y ago
Richard Stallman is not happy at all about the LLVM FOSS situation: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html > You say that as if it's good. > It might be a fact, but it sure ain't good. Is it bad that not everyone understands Hegel or Heidegger? Does that make their writings less useful? > Is there a single good thing that can be argued to come from a language not being popular? It's not a question of good or bad. It's a fact of life that some things are less popular than others, which says nothing about the usefulness of the tool. > I meanbeside BS like "keeps the amateurs away?", which judging by the abundance of amateur Lisp code one sees, is not an actual advantage of Lisp... It's just that not every programmer has the intellectual capability to understand, master and use Lisp. That's a fact. I've seen that myself countless times at university in beginner's courses. Also many programmers don't need the features Lisp offers and are happy with other approaches. For them Lisp is too complex, too flexible, etc. Lots of people can learn some basic Lisp or simple Lisp dialects. But once they use actual features of Lisp, which allows every user to radically change the language, the things get tough... in the industry stuff like that is not liked. They want tools and developers which are more predictable. I think you should get over this 'popularity' BS.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  "Is it bad that not everyone understands Hegel or Heidegger? Does that make their writings less useful?" Yes, actually. If they wrote clearly enough so more people could understand their point, their writings would be more useful. The point of writing something is generally to communicate with others, unless it's a personal journal or diary, meant to be kept private. "It's just that not every programmer has the intellectual capability to understand, master and use Lisp. That's a fact. I've seen that myself countless times at university in beginner's courses." Isn't it much more likely that the difficulties are more due to the fact they are beginners, than due to the language used in the course? Did you teach identical material using other languages, and found the students understood the material better? (Honestly curious.) "But once they use actual features of Lisp, which allows every user to radically change the language, the things get tough... in the industry stuff like that is not liked." Meta-programming in Ruby has the same challenges, but there is definitely a strong segment of commercial developers who whole-heartedly embrace those techniques. They didn't just give up and say "Oh well, guess we have to give up and go back to using Java", or adopt some complex about their language being too brilliant for other programmers to ever use. Instead, they put effort into persuading others the expressive power of Ruby is worth the tradeoff with predictability. They don't convince everyone, but they certainly managed to get a lot of developers on their side. I think the Common Lisp community certainly could have accomplished the same thing. There's nothing about the language itself hindering broader adoption, or limiting it's use to academics or elite programmers. It's just the community that seems to want to keep it that way.