Hacker News Reader

Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it.

Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators. Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery.

After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.

View on HN

Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife.

After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.

I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is.

I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it.

Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again.

Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.

>I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is.

Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it?

It's not "lowest common denominator" to expect a language to stay within certain bounds of flexibility. If every single project has so many macros that it's effectively a DSL that no other programmer anywhere understands, then you've created a software package that becomes instantly unmaintainable if the wrong people get hit by a bus.

In college, by the time I picked up Lisp, I had already used:

* Assembly Language * Basic * Pascal * Forth * C++ * Recursion

And I'd already worked on video games professionally (in 1987, in a project for Lucasfilm Games, before they became LucasArts).

Java and C# had yet to be invented. At the time, there weren't libraries and documentation to speak of in any Lisp, so that's something. It was Common Lisp (as well as "elisp" on the Atari ST, which of course was completely incompatible...).

Since then, I've used tail calls (in Lua, and soon coming to JavaScript), collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions, and all that, in many other languages. I just still hate Lisp, and while I have no problem understanding how to use Lisp, I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages, and in particular I am finding static types to be critical in large system architecture, which are completely lacking in Clojure and other Lisps.

1987, wow, I have to give you my respect. I think then Lisp is just not your thing, but I have to ackownledge that in 1987 they might have sucked. Realistically, the only one I like and know is Clojure and ClojureScript. Maybe I'd hate Common Lisp if I tried it. I know I don't like elisp, because it doesn't even use lexical scope by default, that's just a nightmare.

I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages

That's probably the best question to ask, I think sometimes there's a lot of false benefits to new/different tools, that while cool, rarely add real value.

My observed (but not measured) benefit was enhanced productivity. That said, I'm not sure how much of that is due to Clojure being a Lisp, or more that I switched from Java/C# which are staticly typed and verbose, to a dynamic language. I don't encounter the issues I do in JavaScript and Python (which I have experience with) as much with Clojure though. Mostly that they get harder and harder to maintain over time. Again, I'm not sure this is because of Lisp, I feel it's more due to Clojure's choice to be a functional language first, with default immutability and managed reference types, as well as its smart choice of abstractions, like open polymorphism using protocols and multi-method and CSP instead of event hell.

The only thing I feel are benefits brought over from Lisp are the interactive REPL workflow, concise notation, code that can be used as an extendable serialization format and configuration format, as well as macros (as double edged sword). Macros have helped me in rare times, to avoid having to write verbose code, but at my work we have very few macros even after 2 years of accumulated code, I think we added 5 or 6 macros only. And I wouldn't want to have more, for the reason you mentioned, we're not looking to use our own custom programming language, and add too many macros and that's what you get. By the way, Clojure chose to not have reader macros, which other Lisps have, and are the ones where you can really go crazy changing the very syntax.

I'd be just as fund of another language that would be functional, immutable, interactive and with smart abstractions. I can live without macros, even though I love a good macro when you need one. I would prefer a syntax with only expressions, not a fan of statements, because you're restricted on where you can use them. And I like concise syntax for having to type less and read less, able to see more at once. I reckon not all Lisps fits this description, so maybe its really not Lisp I should evangelize, but Clojure specifically. Elixir also fits this description, that I know of.

On static vs dynamic type systems, I still don't know. I like types, they feel good to have, but I just don't feel they really help, I think they're a false sense of safety, and they just slow you down. That said, maybe they pay back in the long term maintainance, I'm still unsure though.

> I'd be just as fund of another language that would be functional, immutable, interactive and with smart abstractions.

You get all of the above with TypeScript except immutability. Pull in Lodash for extra functional sauce, or the functional variant of Lodash for increased composability. And the serialization format is the industry standard JSON.

Events are really a necessary tool. You're the first person I know of to complain of "event hell;" event-based programming is a key feature of modern operating systems and browsers and applications. I haven't used a CSP (it looks like a Lisp thing?), but it doesn't look like a full replacement for events, but rather streams? And there are functional stream libraries in JavaScript/TypeScript. [0]

I don't deny that having macros as a "sometimes feature" would be a good thing. I just can't stand the Lisp zillions of nested parenthesis. (Thankfully JavaScript callback-hell is also a thing of the past with async/await and Promises...I don't like zillions of levels of callbacks either).

I think once you have static types, immutability isn't as critical, but if you're set on it, there's always Immutable.js [1]

> On static vs dynamic type systems, I still don't know. I like types, they feel good to have, but I just don't feel they really help, I think they're a false sense of safety, and they just slow you down. That said, maybe they pay back in the long term maintainance, I'm still unsure though.

Technical debt earns compound interest over time. Static type systems let you zero out technical debt for almost no effort.

The only "slow you down" I get from TypeScript is defining declarations for libraries that are missing them. That's about 5 minutes to 15 minutes per library. That's an extremely low up front cost to pay, and everything else about TypeScript is faster (auto complete on object members) and better (refactoring is fast and easy enough that it's easy to "just do it" and not put it off until later).

[0] http://reactivex.io/ or https://github.com/cujojs/most/ are good examples.

[1] http://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/

Ya, I would probably be happy with TypeScript. How's the backend story? Is using it with node easy? Is there an interactive mode, or just quick transpilation?

It's pretty trivial to use with Node. You just need to have a source folder, set up your tsconfig.json file with your preferred options, and then run:

    tsc --watch

There's also an REPL for Node here:

    https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node

I find it a bit tricky to do anything complex in, though. Since TypeScript is mostly ES2015 anyway, when I want interactive anything I usually just use an ES2015 interpreter (like Node itself). The types usually make interactive stuff more challenging.

>Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators

Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style?

>Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery.

Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like.

After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference.

Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).

people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.

>Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like.

BZZZZT! Wrong answer!

I started with BASIC and transitioned from there to assembly language. Wrote several games and device drivers in assembly language (BASIC was too slow) and then learned Forth. Tried really hard to like Forth, and played with it for a while; loved some aspects of the language, but couldn't wrap my head around how to write a game with it, so I gave up and kept writing games in assembly language.

Pascal was my next language, and that wasn't until later. Much later than that I finally got to C.

You might think of BASIC as Algol-like, though I'd say it's more Fortran-like. Assembly language, though, is about un-Algol as a language can be, as is Forth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com