5 ms·

I am still waiting for all my favourite applications to be extendable in GNU Guile. On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp i

I am still waiting for all my favourite applications to be extendable in GNU Guile. On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general.

jknoepfler 9y ago
> On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general. Gah, aren't we all? Watching John Carmack push Scheme for the Oculus Rift 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs] made me feel like something was right in the universe.
- leavethebubble 9y ago
  Why not just leave the lisp-bubble and admit it's a terrible type of language which is behind of ML languages in terms of productivity, safety and performance?
  - socksy 9y ago
    Good thing that there isn't an ML bubble then ;)
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Gah, aren't we all? Since I found Haskell, no. Not anymore. And I don't expect Haskell to take over the world either. I do expect a large crop of new languages that extend on the concept, and some of them to take over the world.
eadmund 9y ago
As someone who's spent the last week implementing two different Schemes atop two different languages (Lua & Go), I think I can explain why GNU Guile didn't take off: Scheme. The problem with Scheme is that it's an utterly lovely little language with some wonderfully neat concepts which is great for teaching students about continuations … and it happens to have some broken features, like DYNAMIC-WIND instead of UNWIND-PROTECT, and some design decisions seemed wise at the time but in retrospect were foolish (Lisp-1 seems really awesome, right until you have to use it every day; eliminating NIL and making '() truthy seems very elegant and orthogonal but is actually a right royal pain — and don't even get me started about forbidding (car '())). Scheme pursued a foolish simplicity, foregoing the complexity necessary to deal with the real world. It's a wonderful language for implementing language interpreters, but I wouldn't want to write large programs in it. For that, the only thing worth using is Common Lisp.
- Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
  I don't happen to agree with you on eliminating NIL. I don't understand what the royal pain is. And dynamic-wind is the price you have to pay for call/cc. UNWIND-PROTECT is not the same thing. Multi-shot continuations is he reason. One way would be having explicit one-shot continuations and escape continuations. Those are faster and will make UNWIND-PROTECT work. I am more in favour of delimited continuations though. Delimited continuations makes that a bit simpler (since you can easily implement something like dynamic wind using them).

I am still waiting for all my favourite applications to be extendable in GNU Guile. On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general.

jknoepfler 9y ago

> On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general. Gah, aren't we all? Watching John Carmack push Scheme for the Oculus Rift 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs] made me feel like something was right in the universe.

leavethebubble 9y ago
Why not just leave the lisp-bubble and admit it's a terrible type of language which is behind of ML languages in terms of productivity, safety and performance?
- socksy 9y ago
  Good thing that there isn't an ML bubble then ;)
marcosdumay 9y ago
> Gah, aren't we all? Since I found Haskell, no. Not anymore. And I don't expect Haskell to take over the world either. I do expect a large crop of new languages that extend on the concept, and some of them to take over the world.

eadmund 9y ago

As someone who's spent the last week implementing two different Schemes atop two different languages (Lua & Go), I think I can explain why GNU Guile didn't take off: Scheme. The problem with Scheme is that it's an utterly lovely little language with some wonderfully neat concepts which is great for teaching students about continuations … and it happens to have some broken features, like DYNAMIC-WIND instead of UNWIND-PROTECT, and some design decisions seemed wise at the time but in retrospect were foolish (Lisp-1 seems really awesome, right until you have to use it every day; eliminating NIL and making '() truthy seems very elegant and orthogonal but is actually a right royal pain — and don't even get me started about forbidding (car '())). Scheme pursued a foolish simplicity, foregoing the complexity necessary to deal with the real world. It's a wonderful language for implementing language interpreters, but I wouldn't want to write large programs in it. For that, the only thing worth using is Common Lisp.

Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
I don't happen to agree with you on eliminating NIL. I don't understand what the royal pain is. And dynamic-wind is the price you have to pay for call/cc. UNWIND-PROTECT is not the same thing. Multi-shot continuations is he reason. One way would be having explicit one-shot continuations and escape continuations. Those are faster and will make UNWIND-PROTECT work. I am more in favour of delimited continuations though. Delimited continuations makes that a bit simpler (since you can easily implement something like dynamic wind using them).