Hacker News Reader

Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

Lisp has no reserved words.

Yes, but Hoon would need them. Lisp gets a lot of things for free because it's based on the lambda calculus, which some regard as trivial but I don't.

So, for example, lambda in Hoon is not a primitive but a relatively high-level built-in macro. This means it is part of a larger family of lambda-like things, many of which are (IMHO) quite useful. On the other hand, all these things demand either reserved words, digraphs or Unicode glyphs.

The Lambda Calculus is so tiny how can you view it as anything but trivial?

Just 3 syntactic forms building up an expression tree:

  Expr = Lam Name Expr | Var Name | Apply Expr Expr

And one reduction rule:

  reduce (Apply (Lam name body) arg) = subst name arg body

At least assuming unique names (no shadowing nonsense), you can't get much simpler than this...

You can get rid of the whole name reduction system. Which is hardly trivial. If you assume it, though, it's true that everything else is trivial.

Getting symbol tables, functions, environments, free and bound variables, etc, etc, out of the fundamental automaton, frees you up to design them right at the higher layer where they (IMHO) belong.

This philosophical argument has serious practical ramifications, I think, because it leads directly to the Question of Why Lisp Failed. Why did Lisp fail? Many people say, because it couldn't be standardized properly.

Why couldn't it be standardized? Because the Lisp way is not to start with a simple core and build stuff on top of it, but to start with a simple core and grow hair on it. So you end up with a jungle of Lisps that are abstractly related, but not actually compatible in any meaningful sense. This is because the lambda calculus is an idea, not a layer.

Basically the point of Nock is to say: let's do axiomatic computing such that it's actually a layer in the OS sense. The way the JVM is a layer, but a lot simpler. Lambda isn't a layer in this sense, so it doesn't provide the useful abstraction control that a layer provides.

>I think, because it leads directly to the Question of Why Lisp Failed.

Lisp isn't a failure. You're commenting on a server that is powered by a Lisp.

>Why did Lisp fail? Many people say, because it couldn't be standardized properly.

There was a very good idea about how to standardize Common Lisp back in 1982. It divided documentation into 4 different parts, or 4 different "colored pages". It was eventually abandoned because of the time constraints. Read DLW's (one of the 5 main Common Lisp authors) news.yc post about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81258