ctrlmeta

There is a lesson here for commenters to Show HN too. It is not uncommon to see someone sharing their post with the HN community here, then someone posts a dismissive comment and that quickly gets upvoted to the top. This is a reminder to be kind while giving feedback. Words have great power. With great power comes great responsibility.

Why?

> Are there new things being developed based on windows 3.1?

No

> Are there new things being developed based on lisp?

Yes.

> The analogy is not very good.

I guess I am missing your point. Care to elaborate your point?

You can't just leave us hanging there! Tell us more. What type of problems do you solve with it? Was it hard to get others on board with the idea of CL? Are you happy with your decision of choosing CL for FAANG work? Any advantages/disadvantages you observed during your work?

Interesting. Can you share the text editor? Can I try it out somewhere? Is the editor itself written in Lisp?

They certainly are! I use both everyday. Emacs and Org-mode are so ingrained into my brain and fingers that I just totally forgot that I am using a Lisp system everyday while posting my previous comment.

> These kind of comments _always_ pop up and are either terribly missing the point or written in bad faith.

As someone who loves coding in Lisp myself I assure you my comment is not written in bad faith. And I am not sure what point I am missing. I read the entire TFA from top to bottom and I liked it!

I genuinely want to see a list of projects (preferably open source) written in Lisp. That would help me to support my other arguments when I talk about Lisp with others who do not use Lisp. Thanks to the HN crowd, we have already received a good list of links and examples in the comments of this thread.

I am not sure why I need to be attacked personally for a genuine question.

> "Used today in production" does not mean that it's not dead.

I guess you need to define "dead".

I have to agree with others here that Lisp is not dead for the simple reason that Emacs is not dead. Emacs has a thriving community of developers who code and use Lisp almost everyday to solve problems.

Org-mode alone has a large number of users from all walks of life, from writers to event organizers and Lisp code is written for Org-mode everyday.

There are high-profile well known companies that use Clojure for processing high volume of transactions. They are in all probability writing Clojure code everyday that is going to production everyday.

What exactly is your definition of "dead"?

P.S. You have also completely misrepresented my earlier comment in your comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464215 so I am not entirely sure if you are arguing here in good faith or if you have an axe to grind.

> Because it's possible to have a lot better representations of computer code for humans than AST.

Which are those? I assure you I am a human and I find s-expressions to be clean, elegant, easy to read and easy to understand. I have learnt C, Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Go, Javascript, C++, Rust over the years and I have not found a syntax that feels better to me, the human.

When I am writing tools for myself I reach out for Lisp because it is the most convenient one to write code in. I don't have to worry about all the syntactic ambiguities and complexities of these other languages. With Lisp, I can focus on solving my problem without being weighed down by complex syntaxes of other languages.

You are saying there are better syntaxes out there? Where can I find this elusive language which has better representations of computer code for humans?

> I couldn't see many massive wins over my go-to Python.

A massive win over Python I get is performance! The performance of SBCL or another good implementation beats Python hands down. And I don't have to lose anything to gain that performance. The syntax is much cleaner and more enjoyable than Python. Quicklisp provides a wide variety of packages that I can use to build software. So it has the advantages of Python and superior performance.

> OP didn't really make a point. He just said that he would like posts about lisp being used in production

+1. I am the OP that asked the question. I wasn't making a point. I was asking a question. The company list provided in the response to that was helpful.

I don't have the same experience. I find s-expressions more pleasant to read. On the other hand, I find the syntax of C, Python, etc. to be jarring! The syntax of Rust and C++ feels like nails on chalkboard to me. What I find even more uncomfortable about C++ and Rust (and Python to some extent) is that they keep innovating on syntax and the syntax becomes more and more complex as years go by.

Compared to that mess, Lisp's s-expression is a breath of fresh air. The brain ignores the parentheses soon (just as the brain ignores the braces in C-like languages) and relies on the indentation to understand the structure of the code.

Having said that I do find the prefix notation slightly unintuitive for complex math formulas. Simple stuff like (< x y) is clear to me. No confusion there. But something like the formula for finding quadratic roots feels a bit unwieldy in s-expression syntax. I am sure that is because of years of conditioning of infix notation. Because pre-fix (or post-fix) are purer and unambiguous representations of the mathematical operations we perform. Yet conditioning has made pre-fix or post-fix hard to read for complex math formulas.

The Eureka moment for me was when I realized that I can express LET in terms of LAMBDA. And why stop there? I can express DEFUN in terms of LAMBDA too. All of the code is just LAMBDAs and LAMBDAs. That's when it really clicked for me!

I see a lot of posts justifying why Lisp is nice and should be used. These are good. I agree with them. But I would also like to see posts about actual projects written in Lisp.

Compare with Rust and Go. Rust and Go devs write articles evangelizing Rust but that's not all we see. We also see posts about so many useful Rust and Go projects too.

How can we see a similar trend for Lisp? And no, it cannot be writing a Lisp in a Lisp or writing a Lisp in your favorite language or writing your favorite language in a Lisp. I am looking for useful projects that do something useful for users who can't give a damn what language the project is written in.

I searched https://github.com/topics/lisp but a vast majority of the projects there are not software used by actual users in the wild. Most of them are projects that teach how to make a lisp or documentation about lisp. There are some useful software like browser, editor, etc. in there but they are few and far between.

I know Reddit was written in Lisp but it isn't anymore. So that's a bummer.

Does Roomba still run on Lisp? I can't find out with some quick searches.

HN is written in a dialect of Lisp so that is one example. Can we have more such examples? Even better would be open source examples where any college student can contribute?

> doesn’t work as well on Mac

What specific issues do you face? I've been using Emacs both on Mac and Linux for >= 10 years and never really had any problem. Genuinely want to know what problems other Emacs users on Mac face?

> One problem with this survey is that while it is primarily aimed at existing users

I don't see how this is a problem. The survey wants to see how existing users use Emacs, not how to make Emacs accessible to new users.

If you want to make a survey to see how to make Emacs more accesible to new users, by all means, create such a survey. But this is not that survey. This survey has a different goal.

I, for one, appreciate the goal of this survey. As an Emacs user myself, I want to get a sense of how other Emacs users use Emacs, which project management packages they use, what completion packages they use, how popular Magit is and other general trends among existing Emacs users. Why is that a problem?

Lisp macros (and earlier FEXPRs) predate Zig by 53 years!

As much as I despise P5fRxh5kUvp2th's personal attacks on you (personal attacks have no place in a civilized forum and the uncivil behavior of P5fRxh5kUvp2th should be condemned), I do feel tempted to point out that your responses do not restore any confidence in your article for readers like me. Some problems I see in your counterpoints.

> I was writing that intro based on recalling Andrew Kelley stating in a video

When you are writing for a technical crowd, it is good to be prepared with references and evidence. Unsourced information is likely to be questioned. Unsourced information making dubious claims that go against half a century of computer programming and practice is even more likely to be questioned.

> Can you say for a fact that no language designer expert ever told Andrew Kelley this?

That's not a valid counter-argument. Can you say for a fact that Russell's teapot does not exist? That does not make the existence of Russell's teapot any more likely! The burden of proof lies on you to show that the bold claim you made in your article holds up against scrutiny.

> Programming language experts told Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, that having code which could run at compile time was a really dumb idea.

Really? I can't believe that! Running code at compile time is as old as Lisp! And it is present in some form or other in some other popular programming languages too. Like constexpr and templates in C++.

The original title of the post is "IBM Redefines Hybrid Cloud Application and Data Storage Adding Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings".

> Historically, the first webcam actually predated the web.

Contradiction? Maybe they meant that the first internet cam predated the web?

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot has more details. So the Trojan Room coffee pot cam began its life as a local network cam which then went on to become the first web cam. So no contradiction there! Interesting bit of history!

Why are we seeing a dupe of a LinkedIn-style "motivational" post on the same day? The dupe was literally a few hours ago here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038272

I don't understand it either! Unrelated GIFs in the middle of a tutorial looks silly and distracting. The same antipattern is seen in many tech articles too when they add a "hero image" to the article. The "hero image" almost always is a generic image that does not add anything valuable to the article.

> 4) As the value of these bonds fall, these institutions are asked to post more collateral.

Why do the pension funds (and other institutional investors) need to post collateral? Where do the pension funds post their collateral to?

I guess I will understand why collateral is required if you can explain me what would go wrong if the pension funds were not made to post collateral.

Can you explain what QE is and how long term rates are connected? Do you mean that the fall of pound is inevitably going to require UK banks to increase interest rates to make pound more attractive to investors?

And what's the problem with increasing interest rates? Is it that rising interest rates makes new businesses difficult to borrow money? And difficulty in borrowing money leads to shrinking economy?

I asked this in a different post but did not get any answer, so asking it here hoping someone can help me understand this.

Can someone more financially literate than me explain how BoE buying government bonds is going to restore financial stability? Will it slow down the falling pound? Will it reduce inflation? What mechanisms are at work here?

One thing I never managed to understand. If I run cat and hit ctrl+h, it does not delete the previous character but literally prints ^H. Why is it so? Who is responsible for interpreting ctrl+h and deleting the previous character and why doesn't it do so?

I have been following the developments in UK and the falling pound for the last week. Can someone more financially literate than me explain how BoE buying government bonds is going to restore financial stability? Will it slow down the falling pound? Will it reduce inflation? What mechanisms are at work here?

Probably not what you asked but I don't use GitHub issues or any equivalent walled garden for things outside of development. It is bad enough that we rely on walled gardens so much these days that gives centralized entities so much power on our lives. Imagine one day GitHub locks someone out of their account! Now they would need to find another hosting platform, move their projects and only hope that their new home for projects can get the attention it received earlier on GitHub!

For things outside development, I use my own tracking systems either plain and paper or an Emacs org-mode file.

I think it is a fair question. The older I get I see the less opinionated I get. The opinions get replaced with curiosity as I become old. The reason I am getting less opinionated is that as years go by I come across contradictions to strong opinions I held before which weakens the fervor with which I held those opinions. So I don't think that being less opinionated is lowering my standards. I think richness of life experiences can make someone less opinionated.