6 ms·

> The former have been table stakes for interpreted languages I used to think so too back in the day when I was getting into Clojure. It was much later when I

> The former have been table stakes for interpreted languages I used to think so too back in the day when I was getting into Clojure. It was much later when I realized that when Lisp people talk about the REPL they’re usually talking not so much about the interactive CLI where you can evaluate commands easily but more so the ability to connect your program to a live session where you can quickly evaluate forms within your text editor and in the context of your running application, which enables much more interactive development than in other interpreted languages.

dismalaf 2mo ago
You've been able to do this in Ruby since I can remember. Not a lot of editors take advantage of it though...
- iLemming 2mo ago
  No. There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages - Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc. Every single stage there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop differs. Man, it gets so exhausting trying to convince every PL critic who grabs a single (or a couple) of axis of any language and tries to dispute the value of a language without ever understanding the holistic, overall experience working with it. Like, I don't understand, do people think that tons of Clojurians or Common Lispers who fall in love with the language after decades of working and getting seasoned in literally dozens of different PLs are on some kind of delusional trip or something? Guys, just take a gander at Clojurians Slack; see what people are working on, what kind of stuff they're building; check their profiles. Many of them are the battle-scarred veterans of coding. Sure, some of them may have wrong opinions, but surely they can't be all wrong, can't they?
  - dismalaf 2mo ago
    Tell me your knowledge of Ruby is surface level without telling me... I used Clojure when it first came out, I've used Common Lisp for years, I've also used languages like Smalltalk and many others. Yes, Lisp environments are nice, but sometimes I think Lispers are so insular they don't realize that other languages have similar things. R, Julia and Ruby have similar environments. Smalltalk is next level. And homoiconicity is great for macros and parsing but it's late-binding that enables the live programming behaviour, which isn't exclusive to Lisp. Also if you'd ever gotten deep into say, SB-ALIEN, you'd know the limitations too; Common Lisp isn't magic, it can't just redefine say, instantiated structs in memory. It relies on pointers then switching references on the fly.
    - iLemming 2mo ago
      > they don't realize that other languages have similar things Yes they do. God, how did you (and apparently you're not alone) read my rant and still got it 100% backwards? I specifically hinted about not picking a single aspect of a language - REPL or whatever. What is so confusing about my wording on "holistic, overall experience working with it"?
      - dismalaf 2mo ago
        Apart from your rant, this is the most pertinent part of what you said: > There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL in a homoiconic language. Homoiconicity has nothing to do with a REPL or tools. I do however think SBCL has a very nice environment with great tools (especially it's compiler) and that's why I've used it a lot over the years, but I really think you underestimate the environments in other languages (including the "holistic, overall experience").
        iLemming 2mo ago
        > And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL You are wrong. You might be correct about the workflow but still wrong about the semantics. Pedantically, your notion is false, because homoiconism gives the REPL a genuine capability (program-as-manipulable-data across the read/eval boundary) that non-homoiconic REPLs lack.
        gf000 2mo ago
        Can you parse code into an in-memory representation and can you eval? If yes, then you can do everything that Lisp repls can. The parser being slightly more complex than parsing s-expressions doesn't materially change anything.
        iLemming 2mo ago
        I did not say anything about s-expressions. I said "homoiconicity". S-expressions are not an absolute requirement for homoiconic features. You keep poking me with your "knowledge" as if I'm trying to sell you snake oil and you feel obligated to defend and retaliate. I don't need to prove anything to you, I'm not your ignorant professor attempting to instil you with some defunct truths that exist solely in my head. Do your own research. Or don't, who cares.
  - zbentley 2mo ago
    I wrote GGP as a Lisp user and enjoyer—not pretending to deep experience, but definitely am well acquainted. And neither the REPL nor live reloading are important differentiators. Neither is the ability to attach a REPL to a running program: plenty of languages have that built in (Erlang, Ruby), and many others support it through popular third party tooling (e.g. Pyrasite for Python, and—ironically—the class executor for the Clojure REPL for arbitrary non-Clojure JVM programs). Many Lisps’ REPL tooling is very nice, and the language lends itself well to REPL-oriented development. But those aren’t “uniquely Lisp” features as you and many others claim.
    - iLemming 2mo ago
      Homoiconicity is a "uniquely Lisp" feature and it doesn't seem like you've fully grokked the implications and differences between homoiconic and non-homoiconic. I'm not making this up - every step there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop does differ. That is easily verifiable info.
      - zbentley 2mo ago
        Eval differs very slightly from, say, an interpreter with a very non-syntactic AST, due as you say to homoiconicity. Neither read, print, nor loop differ in any Lisp-specific or qualitative way. And the differences in eval’s behavior don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience (other than that they’re writing Lisp). So what do you mean? Specifically, cached state and behaviors still need to be reconciled with new inputs/overrides during “eval”, and no Lisp has an easy answer to those (neither, as far as I know, does any other language). Avoidance of closure state via late binding and a convention of reliance on very simple data structures help Lisp’s REPL/hot-patch story, and that is indeed nice, but it’s far from “guaranteed ease/safety of REPL patching” or a totally different paradigm.
        iLemming 2mo ago
        > don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience Perhaps you have never tried/heard of nextjournal/clerk, scicloj/clay, djblue/portal, vlaaad/reveal or just simply tried building a simple web scraper with Playwright running on nbb. Oh, and hyperfiddle/electric - something like that would not be very trivial without homoiconicity.
  - Jtsummers 2mo ago
    > There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages Smalltalk is not homoiconic, and it's REPL experience is equivalent (I'd argue somewhat better, but that's mostly a tooling thing, see the commercial CL implementations as examples of improvements over SBCL + Emacs + Slime). Homoiconicity is not the trait that makes the CL REPL experience better than others, it's that it includes a very good debugger, the compiler, hot code reloading, the ability to redefine classes and update current instances, and so on. That's the tooling, not the language, that provides the experience. Nothing about being non-homoiconic prevents other languages from having a comparable (or even better) experience.
    - iLemming 2mo ago
      > Nothing about being non-homoiconic Nothing about being statically/dynamically typed. Nothing about being functional/OOP/relational/logic. Nothing about being pure/side-effecty/strict/lazy. Nothing about being compiled/interpreted. Nothing about imperative/procedural/stack-oriented. You can pick just about any single or (few) aspects about any language. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a programming language and you can find things to complain about. You know that there are three genuine, true, legit ways to build robust, bug-free, performant software? Three! The problem? Nobody knows what they are and that's why we are all doomed to keep bashing on everyone else's choices and opinions. "Better experience" is not dictated by "features". Better experience comes, well, with experience. I suppose it's my own fault. I tried focusing on "holistic, overall experience", yet still picked a single aspect to chime in.
    - boho_derogatory 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - iLemming 2mo ago
        Huh? First time I hear that my account is "regarded" and not just, but "widely" too. What part of your fragile ego my words hurt, I wonder?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gf000 2mo ago
    Why do you think other people who have fallen in love with, say, Ruby, are less experienced in other languages? They just have less of a cult.
    - iLemming 2mo ago
      You sweet, summer child, just so you know, I have existed for nearly half a century in this world where the larger part of it I have spent dealing in computing. I have seen and dealt with more programming languages (including Ruby) than you can count with your fingers and toes and that number keeps growing still. I'm not advocating for any particular language, runtime, framework or paradigm - do use whatever your heart desires. I'm simply pointing out that there is a meaningful difference in REPLs in homoiconic and non-homoiconic PLs. You don't have to listen to me, this is easily verifiable information. Google it, ask LLMs, try it yourself, or ignore the notion entirely - it's completely up to you. But let's not get too intimate and slide into insulting one another - you have no idea who I am and what cults I'm specifically fond of.
      - lysace 2mo ago
        Please be less of an asshole.
        nourr 2mo ago
        You’re an asshole too for talking like that. I am not an asshole for pointing it out though, I’m likable.
        lysace 2mo ago
        iLemming: creating a new user just to say that seems a bit over the top.
        iLemming 2mo ago
        I don't know who that is. I don't play stupid social games to win stupid social prizes. Why would I create a new account and yet keep replying with another one? I have single accounts pretty much everywhere, except Reddit - they shadowbanned my first one when I posted while connected to a VPN (apparently that's not allowed). You can easily use some OSINT tools to confirm that.
  - a96 2mo ago
    I wish someone would just write a clear description of that magic version of REPL that isn't a REPL. Maybe also a demo. And how to get the actual pristine source out once you've done development on a running image. Maybe we could be enlightened. The complaining clearly isn't doing it. Articles like this one didn't succeed either. Pointing at Slack surely isn't going to do it.
lurkercodemnky 2mo ago
you can do that in a python debugger?
- vindarel 2mo ago
  the python debugger is cool but is an inferior experience. It isn't only about a REPL, but about the editing experience, and about the language being thought from the ground up for long-living programs. See: https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/
- iLemming 2mo ago
  [dead]

dismalaf 2mo ago

You've been able to do this in Ruby since I can remember. Not a lot of editors take advantage of it though...

iLemming 2mo ago
No. There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages - Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc. Every single stage there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop differs. Man, it gets so exhausting trying to convince every PL critic who grabs a single (or a couple) of axis of any language and tries to dispute the value of a language without ever understanding the holistic, overall experience working with it. Like, I don't understand, do people think that tons of Clojurians or Common Lispers who fall in love with the language after decades of working and getting seasoned in literally dozens of different PLs are on some kind of delusional trip or something? Guys, just take a gander at Clojurians Slack; see what people are working on, what kind of stuff they're building; check their profiles. Many of them are the battle-scarred veterans of coding. Sure, some of them may have wrong opinions, but surely they can't be all wrong, can't they?
- dismalaf 2mo ago
  Tell me your knowledge of Ruby is surface level without telling me... I used Clojure when it first came out, I've used Common Lisp for years, I've also used languages like Smalltalk and many others. Yes, Lisp environments are nice, but sometimes I think Lispers are so insular they don't realize that other languages have similar things. R, Julia and Ruby have similar environments. Smalltalk is next level. And homoiconicity is great for macros and parsing but it's late-binding that enables the live programming behaviour, which isn't exclusive to Lisp. Also if you'd ever gotten deep into say, SB-ALIEN, you'd know the limitations too; Common Lisp isn't magic, it can't just redefine say, instantiated structs in memory. It relies on pointers then switching references on the fly.
  - iLemming 2mo ago
    > they don't realize that other languages have similar things Yes they do. God, how did you (and apparently you're not alone) read my rant and still got it 100% backwards? I specifically hinted about not picking a single aspect of a language - REPL or whatever. What is so confusing about my wording on "holistic, overall experience working with it"?
    - dismalaf 2mo ago
      Apart from your rant, this is the most pertinent part of what you said: > There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL in a homoiconic language. Homoiconicity has nothing to do with a REPL or tools. I do however think SBCL has a very nice environment with great tools (especially it's compiler) and that's why I've used it a lot over the years, but I really think you underestimate the environments in other languages (including the "holistic, overall experience").
      - iLemming 2mo ago
        > And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL You are wrong. You might be correct about the workflow but still wrong about the semantics. Pedantically, your notion is false, because homoiconism gives the REPL a genuine capability (program-as-manipulable-data across the read/eval boundary) that non-homoiconic REPLs lack.
        gf000 2mo ago
        Can you parse code into an in-memory representation and can you eval? If yes, then you can do everything that Lisp repls can. The parser being slightly more complex than parsing s-expressions doesn't materially change anything.
        iLemming 2mo ago
        I did not say anything about s-expressions. I said "homoiconicity". S-expressions are not an absolute requirement for homoiconic features. You keep poking me with your "knowledge" as if I'm trying to sell you snake oil and you feel obligated to defend and retaliate. I don't need to prove anything to you, I'm not your ignorant professor attempting to instil you with some defunct truths that exist solely in my head. Do your own research. Or don't, who cares.
- zbentley 2mo ago
  I wrote GGP as a Lisp user and enjoyer—not pretending to deep experience, but definitely am well acquainted. And neither the REPL nor live reloading are important differentiators. Neither is the ability to attach a REPL to a running program: plenty of languages have that built in (Erlang, Ruby), and many others support it through popular third party tooling (e.g. Pyrasite for Python, and—ironically—the class executor for the Clojure REPL for arbitrary non-Clojure JVM programs). Many Lisps’ REPL tooling is very nice, and the language lends itself well to REPL-oriented development. But those aren’t “uniquely Lisp” features as you and many others claim.
  - iLemming 2mo ago
    Homoiconicity is a "uniquely Lisp" feature and it doesn't seem like you've fully grokked the implications and differences between homoiconic and non-homoiconic. I'm not making this up - every step there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop does differ. That is easily verifiable info.
    - zbentley 2mo ago
      Eval differs very slightly from, say, an interpreter with a very non-syntactic AST, due as you say to homoiconicity. Neither read, print, nor loop differ in any Lisp-specific or qualitative way. And the differences in eval’s behavior don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience (other than that they’re writing Lisp). So what do you mean? Specifically, cached state and behaviors still need to be reconciled with new inputs/overrides during “eval”, and no Lisp has an easy answer to those (neither, as far as I know, does any other language). Avoidance of closure state via late binding and a convention of reliance on very simple data structures help Lisp’s REPL/hot-patch story, and that is indeed nice, but it’s far from “guaranteed ease/safety of REPL patching” or a totally different paradigm.
      - iLemming 2mo ago
        > don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience Perhaps you have never tried/heard of nextjournal/clerk, scicloj/clay, djblue/portal, vlaaad/reveal or just simply tried building a simple web scraper with Playwright running on nbb. Oh, and hyperfiddle/electric - something like that would not be very trivial without homoiconicity.
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
  > There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages Smalltalk is not homoiconic, and it's REPL experience is equivalent (I'd argue somewhat better, but that's mostly a tooling thing, see the commercial CL implementations as examples of improvements over SBCL + Emacs + Slime). Homoiconicity is not the trait that makes the CL REPL experience better than others, it's that it includes a very good debugger, the compiler, hot code reloading, the ability to redefine classes and update current instances, and so on. That's the tooling, not the language, that provides the experience. Nothing about being non-homoiconic prevents other languages from having a comparable (or even better) experience.
  - iLemming 2mo ago
    > Nothing about being non-homoiconic Nothing about being statically/dynamically typed. Nothing about being functional/OOP/relational/logic. Nothing about being pure/side-effecty/strict/lazy. Nothing about being compiled/interpreted. Nothing about imperative/procedural/stack-oriented. You can pick just about any single or (few) aspects about any language. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a programming language and you can find things to complain about. You know that there are three genuine, true, legit ways to build robust, bug-free, performant software? Three! The problem? Nobody knows what they are and that's why we are all doomed to keep bashing on everyone else's choices and opinions. "Better experience" is not dictated by "features". Better experience comes, well, with experience. I suppose it's my own fault. I tried focusing on "holistic, overall experience", yet still picked a single aspect to chime in.
  - boho_derogatory 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - iLemming 2mo ago
      Huh? First time I hear that my account is "regarded" and not just, but "widely" too. What part of your fragile ego my words hurt, I wonder?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- gf000 2mo ago
  Why do you think other people who have fallen in love with, say, Ruby, are less experienced in other languages? They just have less of a cult.
  - iLemming 2mo ago
    You sweet, summer child, just so you know, I have existed for nearly half a century in this world where the larger part of it I have spent dealing in computing. I have seen and dealt with more programming languages (including Ruby) than you can count with your fingers and toes and that number keeps growing still. I'm not advocating for any particular language, runtime, framework or paradigm - do use whatever your heart desires. I'm simply pointing out that there is a meaningful difference in REPLs in homoiconic and non-homoiconic PLs. You don't have to listen to me, this is easily verifiable information. Google it, ask LLMs, try it yourself, or ignore the notion entirely - it's completely up to you. But let's not get too intimate and slide into insulting one another - you have no idea who I am and what cults I'm specifically fond of.
    - lysace 2mo ago
      Please be less of an asshole.
      - nourr 2mo ago
        You’re an asshole too for talking like that. I am not an asshole for pointing it out though, I’m likable.
        lysace 2mo ago
        iLemming: creating a new user just to say that seems a bit over the top.
        iLemming 2mo ago
        I don't know who that is. I don't play stupid social games to win stupid social prizes. Why would I create a new account and yet keep replying with another one? I have single accounts pretty much everywhere, except Reddit - they shadowbanned my first one when I posted while connected to a VPN (apparently that's not allowed). You can easily use some OSINT tools to confirm that.
- a96 2mo ago
  I wish someone would just write a clear description of that magic version of REPL that isn't a REPL. Maybe also a demo. And how to get the actual pristine source out once you've done development on a running image. Maybe we could be enlightened. The complaining clearly isn't doing it. Articles like this one didn't succeed either. Pointing at Slack surely isn't going to do it.

lurkercodemnky 2mo ago

you can do that in a python debugger?

vindarel 2mo ago
the python debugger is cool but is an inferior experience. It isn't only about a REPL, but about the editing experience, and about the language being thought from the ground up for long-living programs. See: https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/
iLemming 2mo ago
[dead]