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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't change the point. It's called JAVA but with lazy streams and closures, everything Java culture built prior that will be moot and that's what the article is pointing at. Same thing happened in PHP land, people say PHP is great now, but what is PHP ? PHP5, which is a perlish javaesque thing ? or the regex craze html implicit template system that was PHP4 ? ...

OOP is too verbose by it's essence compared to closures. I tend to see curried functions as anonymous objects (old lisp koans joke on their duality).

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> Same thing happened in PHP land, people say PHP is great now, but what is PHP ? PHP5, which is a perlish javaesque thing ? or the regex craze html implicit template system that was PHP4 ? ...

Get the facts straight please.

As much as I don't like everything about PHP, PHP means PHP5 and it has been like that for a few years.

I'm talking about languages evolution. PHP5 got a Javaesque Object System, closures, generators. The idioms that will emerge will be close to other language with similar features, and what made php php is becoming less and less so.

> OOP is too verbose by it's essence compared to closures.

Could you comment on Smalltalk's blocks?

I never used ST, I thought a block == closures, but according to http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkBlocksAndClosures there were differences until they wanted to make blocks real closures.

edit : I should have said closures + curryfication so you can partially augment the creation of a final callable entity that binds many parameters (similar to an object constructor arguments)

PHP is actually the perfect example to disprove my point (pig with new lipstick). I'll reflect on that.

PHP is a funny thing, started very very low (https://twitter.com/agumonkey/status/488432654577303554), and nowadays it's got a lot of very positive improvements (linguistic features, faster interpreter, principled community). Who knows how long it will survive ...

> OOP is too verbose by it's essence compared to closures.

Then CLOS is too verbose?

CLOS is a layer on top of CL, it's optional. Also, LISPs are as verbose as you want them too. If you identify boilerplate you macro it away. It's part of the culture. Some systems (php/symfony2, eclipse/emf) go out of their way to generate unnecessary temporary files, templates and such but it's still cumbersome.

To be honest, CL shows its age (mapc, mapl, do, dotimes, loop ...), more functional approaches like sml are very tempting, for the small size of their core in which you define all other patterns. I'd love to see a blend of lisp and ml (racket maybe?).

Talk about workarounds.

Lisp macros ? (first-class and generic, not bad for a workaround)

No, faced with the fact that CLOS is also verbose, although in a language that is all about closures, you started to present workarounds how to simplify its verbosity.

I don't find CLOS verbose. Private slots by default, accessors as option ... I find LISPs quite succint in general, sure lots of parens, but usually the bare minimum of information is required. This contrasts with the large amount of useless code you can see in Java class definition that amount to nothing (setting fields, toString, manual get/set).

CLOS is verbose if all you're doing is encapsulating some state. If, on the other hand, you plan on doing anything remotely interesting, it's very succinct and expressive. Trying to emulate the functionality of CLOS' multiple dispatch and mixins in Java or C++ is hell beyond hell.

As for verbosity, I'll take ":accessor foo" over methods "getFoo" and "setFoo" with inane, useless autogenerated comments any day of the week.

I find it very strange that you've thrown LOOP in there. It may not be as sexy as canned functional algorithms or simple recursion, but for complex algorithms, it's an absolute joy to use.

I couldn't count the number of times I've been writing C or C++ and wished I could express an idea more complex than "Initialize some variables (which may or may not be of the same type (but not of arbitrary different types)); run while this is true; do this thing after every iteration" without just slapping everything into and in the immediate vicinity of a while-true block. I don't have that problem with LOOP.

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