S-expressions. Defining data in JSON or XML is way worse than S-expressions.
619 karma · joined August 10, 2017
Here's a layup: art. Remember the writer's union strike in 2007-2008? All of the shows whose writers were on strike that still went on were terrible.
Edit: also, the purpose of a union is not to "produce something better". The purpose of a union is to protect workers' rights. They generally serve their purpose very well.
Also, doesn't inheritance interfere a bit with your "functions aren't tied concretely together to types" observation? You can examine a source file for ArrayList, but if it extends List, you may not see everything you expect to see, and would just defer to the docs to help you out (or click through more source files).
I assume Racket contracts can handle your concern about relating functions and types. An IDE or static analysis tool can help you find all of the functions that operate on a `dict` type if you don't want to rely on conventions where you just seek out a dict.rkt file.
For what it's worth, coming from lots of Java experience, as a Racket novice, I poked around the Racket internals and added Candlesticks to its `plot` library [0] and removed a call to a deprecated gdk function that was causing overhead when drawing text [1]. It never felt like an insurmountable task just because methods aren't defined within types.
By finding problems with Lisp, you are finding problems with s-expressions, which, to me, are so plainly superior to XML and JSON for defining data that I wish more languages would at least consider adopting them for data definitions.
[0] https://github.com/racket/plot/commit/7f38feaf6e28a1decec93d...
> Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read–eval–print loop.
So many proficient coders were able to grasp features of Lisp, find the fitness of those features, and implement them in their own languages.
They do in Racket? You look at the "List" documentation and you find all of the functions for lists. Likewise with hash tables, numbers, strings, sequences, files, etc.
> The only way to know strcat, puts, and strlen exist is…
... to look at the documentation on docs.racket-lang.org. The powerful search includes results not only for the standard ("batteries included") library reference, but also the standard guide and 3rd party libraries.
> once I had my traits that I also wanted compile-time attributes à la Rust/C# and there’s no clean way to add those to Lisp’s syntax
I mean, why are you not able to do (trait whatever) before (define whatever) or (for-each whatever) or (let whatever)?
> Lisp is neat but it just doesn’t fit in the future of programming that Rust and C#
Have you tried it or did you just try to figure out why you don't think you like it from an LLM?
This is a bad thing.
From a political perspective, perhaps.
> doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do
From a military perspective, taking Taiwan by force would allow China to, "threaten the sea lines of communication and to strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is unlikely to otherwise be able to do." Taiwan would give China access to the Philippine Sea. https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2022-green.pdf
There is absolutely no way a 3 month old is potty trained. As in, the 3 month old infant can communicate and use a toilet. They likely can't even hold their head up at that age.
https://www.babycenter.com/baby/diapering/infant-potty-train... indicates that a potty can be introduced from 4- to 6-months old. Potty trained by 18 months is much more reasonable.
I've written a bit of Racket code (https://github.com/evdubs?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language...) and I still haven't written a macro. In only one case did I even think a macro would be useful: merging class member definitions to include both the type and the default value on the same line. It's sort of a shame that Racket, a Scheme with a much larger standard library and many great user-contributed libraries, has to deal with the Scheme/Lisp marketing of "you can build low level tools with macros" when it's more likely that Racket developers won't need to write macros since they're already written and part of the standard library.
> But the success of Parsec has filled Hackage with hundreds of bespoke DSLs for everything. One for parsing, one for XML, one for generating PDFs. Each is completely different, and each demands its own learning curve. Consider parsing XML, mutating it based on some JSON from a web API, and writing it to a PDF.
What a missed opportunity to preach another gospel of Lisp: s-expressions. XML and JSON are forms of data that are likely not native to the programming language you're using (the exception being JSON in JavaScript). What is better than XML or JSON? s-expressions. How do Lisp developers deal with XML and JSON? Convert it to s-expressions. What about defining data? Since you have s-expressions, you aren't limited to XML and JSON and you can instead use sorted maps for your data or use proper dates for your data; you don't need to fit everything into the array, hash, string, and float buckets as you would with JSON.
If you've been hearing about Lisp and you get turned off by all of this "you can build a DSL and use better macros" marketing, Racket has been a much more comfortable environment for a developer used to languages with large standard libraries like Java and C#.
I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.
It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.
Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions are a better version of JSON and are first class components of Lisp.
I would love a similar tool for Racket.