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If you're truly passionate about hacking it would be hard to avoid becoming a LISP snob at some point in your development. But if you're pragmatic, you'd be abl

If you're truly passionate about hacking it would be hard to avoid becoming a LISP snob at some point in your development. But if you're pragmatic, you'd be able to transfer what you've learned from LISP to other environments, that may be better suitable for today's technological landscape. Is Google Go the way to go? Only time will tell. But there's little you can usefully do with LISP these days (unless the scope of the program you're working on is so restricted that you really only need the language purely).

deleted 17y ago
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barrkel 17y ago
If you get into compilers and language design, all languages turn into more formalized versions of Lisp mixed with some libraries and macros. Lisp in many ways is little more than a serialization format for a syntax tree, with a DSL for converting that tree into an executable program. That's both its biggest advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage in that it can be stretched and flexed to cover any problem domain, by rigging up a language suited to the domain. On the other hand, the fact that it's so flexible means there's less common points of reference for composition in the large. Learning a language for a domain is usually more work than learning a library that uses familiar idioms, even if it is more flexible in the long term. If that domain isn't your bread and butter, a library suits you better. It comes down to an economic argument, I believe. Some level of centralization is necessary to overcome the transaction costs of fitting lots of little languages together, which each have their own ideas about how things should work. It helps hugely in tooling, debugging, analysis, etc. Syntactic transformation via macros from a high-level language to a lower level isn't enough to create a practical modern language in the large. You need more. As to the practical applicability of Lisp, I think you can get most of what you need with something like Clojure.
kmcgivney 17y ago
Nice troll. Isn't Hacker News written in lisp? EDIT: HN is written in Arc. You're saying that there's "little you can usefully do with LISP" on a site which was written in lisp.
- forensic 17y ago
  Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.
  - pg 17y ago
    No, that's not true. The software works quite well, especially considering how few lines of code it is. (To be able to say that was one of the goals for both app and language.) What I said was that it's not user features that keep people here. But there is more to the software than user features. A good example is the code that protects against various kinds of abuse, like spam, trolls, and voting rings. By LOC that is a large percentage of the total, and HN as a community would be long since dead without it.

deleted 17y ago

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barrkel 17y ago

If you get into compilers and language design, all languages turn into more formalized versions of Lisp mixed with some libraries and macros. Lisp in many ways is little more than a serialization format for a syntax tree, with a DSL for converting that tree into an executable program. That's both its biggest advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage in that it can be stretched and flexed to cover any problem domain, by rigging up a language suited to the domain. On the other hand, the fact that it's so flexible means there's less common points of reference for composition in the large. Learning a language for a domain is usually more work than learning a library that uses familiar idioms, even if it is more flexible in the long term. If that domain isn't your bread and butter, a library suits you better. It comes down to an economic argument, I believe. Some level of centralization is necessary to overcome the transaction costs of fitting lots of little languages together, which each have their own ideas about how things should work. It helps hugely in tooling, debugging, analysis, etc. Syntactic transformation via macros from a high-level language to a lower level isn't enough to create a practical modern language in the large. You need more. As to the practical applicability of Lisp, I think you can get most of what you need with something like Clojure.

kmcgivney 17y ago

Nice troll. Isn't Hacker News written in lisp? EDIT: HN is written in Arc. You're saying that there's "little you can usefully do with LISP" on a site which was written in lisp.

forensic 17y ago
Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.
- pg 17y ago
  No, that's not true. The software works quite well, especially considering how few lines of code it is. (To be able to say that was one of the goals for both app and language.) What I said was that it's not user features that keep people here. But there is more to the software than user features. A good example is the code that protects against various kinds of abuse, like spam, trolls, and voting rings. By LOC that is a large percentage of the total, and HN as a community would be long since dead without it.