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That you think assembly is fundamental rather than an accident of architecture really shows how undereducsted you are in computer science. Lisp isn't great beca

That you think assembly is fundamental rather than an accident of architecture really shows how undereducsted you are in computer science. Lisp isn't great because it's weird, it's great because it lucked into homoiconicity in its birth. It's weird because no other language family can do that. It's not popular because the majority of programmers are mediocre and will never understand the point of homoiconicity.

darthrupert 4y ago
It also could be that autistic people such as yourself are such a small minority, that a programming language targetted for them won't ever have a large audience.
- throw009 4y ago
  Greatness is indeed reserved for the few. I guess the masses can muddle through with rust or typescript.
danuker 4y ago
Show me homoiconicity used "for real". Sure, it's useful in compilers and interpreters, but how often do people need them in a business application? You will most likely use a library, and/or a syntax designed for serialization instead of programming, like JSON. I personally vastly prefer Python's syntax over Lisp's, because the parentheses require two buttons pressed (shift + 9) instead of one (tab). That may sound trivial, but it's why I jump to Python instead of a Lisp. That said, I do suffer from Python problems: the GIL, clunky immutable data structures like pyrsistent, poor support for shared memory for multithreading and so on. Edit: I just realized in Lisp you could replace the built-in data structures if you wanted, so libraries like pyrsistent would require little change in client code syntax. I guess that's one example of homoiconicity in action. Can you come up with another one? It is not very often that I find myself wanting to redefine the language I'm using (which comes with its risks: other coders and/or their tooling might find my code hard to follow).
- throw009 4y ago
  Running with the json example you don't need a json library in lisp because you'd just dump an s-expression holding the data you want directly. You don't need a library to parse it because it's already in a format that lisp can understand. Hilariously enough the project that made me switch to lisp from python as my scripting language was writing a lightweight parser for ascii delimited files - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter?useskin=vector#ASCII_delimited_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter?useskin=vector#ASCII... - instead of csv files. After doing it in both I had the eureka moment of using nested s-expressions in the scheme version instead of special characters. All of a sudden I had access to a csv like file which could be arbitrarily nested and didn't require me to worry about escaping. The next mind blowing moment was when I realized I could embed the code of the parser as the header of the format as the type definition and use it to evaluate the format with the program that was used to create it. You don't even need some deep insanity to do it just: (eval `(,(car ls) (cadr ls)) (interaction-environment)) It also shows why I wouldn't use lisp for everything: if I wanted to ingest a file of a known csv dialect that won't fit in memory I'd do it in C after doing the prototype/master version in lisp. I also wouldn't trust running unverified source code from the internet. But for internal projects it's better than sliced bread.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Well, I wrote a genetic programming library, and it was fun to parse a Lisp-like representation from Python. You still have recursion and everything (albeit no tail call optimization). Here, `_from_source` goes from a plain array of tokens to a nested one (tree), depending on their arity: https://github.com/danuker/symreg/blob/7c6593d3046f6c52dfb92f5c697ff7f10d036165/symreg/ga.py#L156 https://github.com/danuker/symreg/blob/7c6593d3046f6c52dfb92... S-Exps are almost valid Python. The exception is the single-element tuple which needs a comma: (x,) But I still preferred to use Python as a programming language, and Lisp as a sort of AST. It's just easier. I am curious what roadblocks you faced in your ASCII delimited parsing. Do you by any chance still have the two parsers? I'd love to see them. If you are worried about your anonymity, you can find my e-mail on my blog, and my website on my HN profile. I promise not to disclose your identity publicly.

darthrupert 4y ago

It also could be that autistic people such as yourself are such a small minority, that a programming language targetted for them won't ever have a large audience.

throw009 4y ago
Greatness is indeed reserved for the few. I guess the masses can muddle through with rust or typescript.

danuker 4y ago

Show me homoiconicity used "for real". Sure, it's useful in compilers and interpreters, but how often do people need them in a business application? You will most likely use a library, and/or a syntax designed for serialization instead of programming, like JSON. I personally vastly prefer Python's syntax over Lisp's, because the parentheses require two buttons pressed (shift + 9) instead of one (tab). That may sound trivial, but it's why I jump to Python instead of a Lisp. That said, I do suffer from Python problems: the GIL, clunky immutable data structures like pyrsistent, poor support for shared memory for multithreading and so on. Edit: I just realized in Lisp you could replace the built-in data structures if you wanted, so libraries like pyrsistent would require little change in client code syntax. I guess that's one example of homoiconicity in action. Can you come up with another one? It is not very often that I find myself wanting to redefine the language I'm using (which comes with its risks: other coders and/or their tooling might find my code hard to follow).

throw009 4y ago
Running with the json example you don't need a json library in lisp because you'd just dump an s-expression holding the data you want directly. You don't need a library to parse it because it's already in a format that lisp can understand. Hilariously enough the project that made me switch to lisp from python as my scripting language was writing a lightweight parser for ascii delimited files - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter?useskin=vector#ASCII_delimited_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter?useskin=vector#ASCII... - instead of csv files. After doing it in both I had the eureka moment of using nested s-expressions in the scheme version instead of special characters. All of a sudden I had access to a csv like file which could be arbitrarily nested and didn't require me to worry about escaping. The next mind blowing moment was when I realized I could embed the code of the parser as the header of the format as the type definition and use it to evaluate the format with the program that was used to create it. You don't even need some deep insanity to do it just: (eval `(,(car ls) (cadr ls)) (interaction-environment)) It also shows why I wouldn't use lisp for everything: if I wanted to ingest a file of a known csv dialect that won't fit in memory I'd do it in C after doing the prototype/master version in lisp. I also wouldn't trust running unverified source code from the internet. But for internal projects it's better than sliced bread.
- danuker 4y ago
  Well, I wrote a genetic programming library, and it was fun to parse a Lisp-like representation from Python. You still have recursion and everything (albeit no tail call optimization). Here, `_from_source` goes from a plain array of tokens to a nested one (tree), depending on their arity: https://github.com/danuker/symreg/blob/7c6593d3046f6c52dfb92f5c697ff7f10d036165/symreg/ga.py#L156 https://github.com/danuker/symreg/blob/7c6593d3046f6c52dfb92... S-Exps are almost valid Python. The exception is the single-element tuple which needs a comma: (x,) But I still preferred to use Python as a programming language, and Lisp as a sort of AST. It's just easier. I am curious what roadblocks you faced in your ASCII delimited parsing. Do you by any chance still have the two parsers? I'd love to see them. If you are worried about your anonymity, you can find my e-mail on my blog, and my website on my HN profile. I promise not to disclose your identity publicly.