> Lisp hackers have been effortlessly reshaping the language for decades using the powerful macro system and extending and bending the language to their will.
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#.
0x3444ac53 9 minutes ago [-]
For what it's worth, anytime I have written a macro it's usually not because it's needed, but just because I think it'll be fun :)
moron4hire 44 minutes ago [-]
Sometime back 15 years ago [0], I hit a bit of an existential crisis regarding my career and the kind of work I was doing.
I thought the particular technology I was working in was "part of the problem", as I felt pigeon-holed by .NET and C# to always be a corporate-monkey CRUD consultant. So, I went out in search of something better. Different programming languages. Different environments. Just something that wasn't working for asshole clients who thought it was okay to yell at people about an outage in a hotel on the complete opposite side of the country that was more due to local radio interference than anything I had done in the database code that configured things. Long story involving missing a holiday with my family over something completely outside of my control and yet I still got blamed for it. The problem wasn't the technology, it was the company I was working for, but at that time in my life, I didn't understand the difference.
Racket was a life preserver at that time.
It's really hard to explain, because I never actually ended up working in Racket full-time and I haven't even touched it in probably 10 years. But it still has this impact on my identity as a software developer. I learned Racket. I forced myself out of being a Glub programmer and into someone who saw the strings that underwrote The Universe. The beauty of S-Expressions and syntactic forms and code-is-data and all that. It had a permanent impact on my view of what this job could be.
I still work primarily in .NET. Most of the things that were technological issues about .NET Framework got absolved by what was first .NET Core and what is now .NET. So, I no longer feel like my tools are holding me back. And I'll forever be thankful to Racket (and the community! The Racket listserve was amazing back then. Probably still is, I just don't interact with it anymore) for being there for me.
Edit: Haskell was in fact another language I explored at that time, in addition to Ocaml and Ruby and Python (ugh! Don't get me started on Python!) and many other things. They were all "cool" in their own way, but nothing felt like Racket. They all had their own weird rules that felt like being bossed at again. Racket felt like art. Racket felt like it was there for me, not the other way around.
[0] I still think of this time as the "mid-point" in my career, but it's now been long enough ago that I've been more past the crisis than I was ever in it. Strange feelings.
kolme 3 hours ago [-]
> Of course, to be completely fair about my toolkit, standard Scheme can sometimes lack the heavyweight, “batteries-included” ecosystem required for massive enterprise production compared to the JVM.
I was thinking the whole time, "this person would _love_ Clojure".
nathan_compton 3 hours ago [-]
Kawa is a Scheme which runs on the JVM and is pretty great.
I am one of these people who cannot countenance a Lisp that doesn't have `syntax-case`.
packetlost 3 hours ago [-]
as a part time schemer, I also love Clojure and reach for it more often than Scheme these days.
coldtea 9 minutes ago [-]
Because they're elegant. Haskell is a conceptual and syntax mess.
ngruhn 3 minutes ago [-]
Compared to lisp? Ok fine. Syntax doesn't get more simple than Lisp. But compared to JavaScript? C++? C#? Haskell is top tier when it comes to syntactic and conceptual elegance. The biggest problem is tooling, I would say.
ggm 14 hours ago [-]
> Actually, in my opinion, Scheme (and Lisp) allows you to express complex systems and problem domains in more simple terms than any other language can.
Short article. Worth reading. But all I swallowed was this one sentence.
Its the sytax. If you like semicolons, thats why you like Pascal-like languages.
reikonomusha 3 hours ago [-]
For all practical purposes, the syntax of Lisp isn't just a cosmetic choice, though.
rauli_ 2 hours ago [-]
Lisp was meant to be written with M-expressions instead of S-expressions anyway.
reikonomusha 2 hours ago [-]
For a brief period of time over 60 years ago, yes. :)
SideQuark 45 minutes ago [-]
M-expressions were never implemented and never used.
ux266478 23 minutes ago [-]
Haskell's syntax comes from ISWIM, which was motivated quite a lot by m-expressions.
Grosvenor 28 minutes ago [-]
Except in mathematica - which isn’t formally a lisp, but practically it’s used like one a lot of the time.
wild_egg 3 hours ago [-]
If you know lisp, just reach for Coalton instead of Haskell
anonzzzies 3 hours ago [-]
Coalton has some evolution to go before that, but it is good and flexible enough.
reikonomusha 3 hours ago [-]
What evolution in particular do you think? The developers use it for commercial products in quantum computing and defense [1]. That doesn't mean it's done in some complete language ecosystem sense (which is discussed in [1], and one could argue Haskell also never feels "finished"), but it also doesn't seem like an unfinished hobby project. Given that it's embedded in Common Lisp, there's always a way to fill in the library gaps, sort of like how if a "native" library doesn't exist in Clojure, one can always reach for Java.
[1] From Toward Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Software in Common Lisp at the European Lisp Symposium, "[Coalton] has been used for the past 5 or so years [...] first in quantum computing and now a serious defense application." https://youtu.be/xuSrsjqJN4M&t=9m14s
anonzzzies 2 hours ago [-]
I am an avid sbcl and coalton user (and sponsor of both when I can) and never said it was not a great thing; comparing it to Haskell is, outside the theoretical type system roots, just a bit early type system wise.
I agree with you further and you did an excellent promotional comment for Coalton and CL; keep doing that please. I have said many times here before that I did not like my time away from CL and Coalton makes it even better.
1 hours ago [-]
crabbone 1 hours ago [-]
I don't believe monads are a "heavy handed abstraction" and that's what prevents people from prototyping in Haskell.
What really prevents people from writing in Haskell at a reasonable speed is the poor language design. Programming languages are supposed to aid in reading by emphasizing structure. It's important to emphasize that a particular group of "words" constitutes a function call, or a variable definition, or a type definition -- whatever the language has to offer.
Haskell is a word salad. Every line you read, you have to read multiple times, every time trying to guess the structure from the disconnected acronyms. It belongs to the "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" gimmick family. This is a huge roadblock on the way to prototyping as well as any other activity that implies the ability to read code quickly. And then it's also spiced by the most bizarre indentation rules invented by men.
This is not at all a problem with eg. SML or Erlang, even though they are roughly in the same category of languages.
Haskell would've been a much better language if it made its syntax more systematic and disallowed syntactical extensions s.a. introduction of user-invented infix operators, overloading of literals (heaven, why???) and requiring parenthesis around function arguments both for definition and for application. The execution model is great, the typesystem is great... but the surface, the front door to all these nice things the language has is just some amateur level nonsense.
* * *
As for the upsides of using languages from the Lisp family for practical problems... I don't find (syntax-rules ...) all that exciting. I understand this was an attempt to constrain the freedom given by Common Lisp macros, and I don't think it worked. I think it's clumsy and annoying to deal with. The very first time I tried to use it, I ran into its limitations, and that felt completely unjustified. To prototype, you want freedom of movement, not some pedantry that will stand in your way and demand you work around it somehow.
The absolute selling point, however, is SWANK. Instead of editing the source code, you are editing the program itself, that can be interacted with in points of your choosing. I don't know of any modern language that offers this kind of experience. I think, even still in the 80s, this approach to programmers interacting with computers was common. At school, we had terminals with some variety of Basic, and it worked just like that: you type the program and it instantly shows the effect of your changes. Then, there was also Forth, which also worked in a similar way: it felt like you are "talking" to the computer in a very organized and structured way, but real-time.
Most mainstream languages today sprouted from the idea of batch jobs, where the programmer isn't at the keyboard when the program runs. They came with the need to anticipate and protect the programmer from every minor mistake they might've easily detected and fixed during an interactive session far, far in advance.
Whenever I think about writing in C, or Rust, or Haskell, I imagine being tasked with going to the grocery blindfolded: I'd need to memorize the number of steps, the turns, predict the traffic, have canned strategies for what to do when potatoes go on sale... I deeply regret that programming evolved using this evolution path, and our idea of what it means to program is, mostly, the skill of guessing the impossible to predict future, instead of learning to react to the events as they unfold.
busterarm 3 hours ago [-]
I learned Scheme before Haskell and as much as I enjoyed the experience, I still wouldn't reach for Haskell first. It's pretty much limited to my xmonad configuration.
nathan_compton 3 hours ago [-]
I have written a very large codebase in Scheme (gambit) and in the end I really, really, wanted a type system to catch bugs.
rahen 2 hours ago [-]
Jank looks promising if you want a typed Lisp. It’s essentially native Clojure without the JVM:
https://jank-lang.org/
In case you're into machine learning, I'm also building something similar - a tensor-first, native Clojure-like ML framework.
busterarm 1 hours ago [-]
I get where you're coming from but I talked to a few folks working in large Haskell codebases and I'm not sure I would make that trade.
anthk 1 hours ago [-]
I tried some ML language once, it's difficult even to write a basic factorial example,
which in Scheme I could do it iteratively and recursively with ease.
Either with S9 Scheme for quick fun (it has Unix sockets and ncurses :D ) or Chicken Scheme for completeneless (R5RS/R7RS-small + modules), I always have fun with both.
Oh, and well, Forth, too, but more like a puzzle (altough it shines to teach you that you can do a lot with a fixed point). Hint: write helpers for rationals -a/b where a is an integer and b a non-zero integer- and complex numbers by placing two items in the stack for each case (for rat helpers you need four (a/b [+-*/] c/d) .
You can have a look at qcomplex.tcl (either online or installed) as an example on how can it work even under JimTCL itself by just sourcing that file. Magic, complex numbers under jimsh thanks to the algebraic properties. So, you can implement the same for yourself in some Forths, even under EForth for Muxleq. Useless? It depends, under an ESP32 it can be damn fast, faster than Micropython.
zelphirkalt 8 minutes ago [-]
From my limited SMLNJ experience I think for something as simple as factorial, it is nearly the same. Both have TCO, recursion, inner functions, pattern matching and those good things. You can structure the code the same way.
zarakshR 1 hours ago [-]
I don't see how:
Racket:
> (define (fact n)
(if (= n 1)
1
(* n (fact (- n 1)))))
> (fact 6)
720
OCaml:
# let rec fact = function
| 1 -> 1
| n when n > 1 -> n * (fact (n - 1))
in fact 6;;
- : int = 720
kubb 59 minutes ago [-]
Whenever someone complains about not being able to use a slightly different syntax, I assume they just don't have any neuroplasticity anymore.
nine_k 1 hours ago [-]
Even as simple as
fac 1 = 1
fac n = n * (fac (n - 1))
which is a working Haskell implementation?
I mean, in Scheme it is longer to write. I enjoy Lisps and use Emacs for everything, but Haskell can be as terse, or even more terse. (Which is not always a good thing.)
z3ratul163071 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 22:40:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 thought the particular technology I was working in was "part of the problem", as I felt pigeon-holed by .NET and C# to always be a corporate-monkey CRUD consultant. So, I went out in search of something better. Different programming languages. Different environments. Just something that wasn't working for asshole clients who thought it was okay to yell at people about an outage in a hotel on the complete opposite side of the country that was more due to local radio interference than anything I had done in the database code that configured things. Long story involving missing a holiday with my family over something completely outside of my control and yet I still got blamed for it. The problem wasn't the technology, it was the company I was working for, but at that time in my life, I didn't understand the difference.
Racket was a life preserver at that time.
It's really hard to explain, because I never actually ended up working in Racket full-time and I haven't even touched it in probably 10 years. But it still has this impact on my identity as a software developer. I learned Racket. I forced myself out of being a Glub programmer and into someone who saw the strings that underwrote The Universe. The beauty of S-Expressions and syntactic forms and code-is-data and all that. It had a permanent impact on my view of what this job could be.
I still work primarily in .NET. Most of the things that were technological issues about .NET Framework got absolved by what was first .NET Core and what is now .NET. So, I no longer feel like my tools are holding me back. And I'll forever be thankful to Racket (and the community! The Racket listserve was amazing back then. Probably still is, I just don't interact with it anymore) for being there for me.
Edit: Haskell was in fact another language I explored at that time, in addition to Ocaml and Ruby and Python (ugh! Don't get me started on Python!) and many other things. They were all "cool" in their own way, but nothing felt like Racket. They all had their own weird rules that felt like being bossed at again. Racket felt like art. Racket felt like it was there for me, not the other way around.
[0] I still think of this time as the "mid-point" in my career, but it's now been long enough ago that I've been more past the crisis than I was ever in it. Strange feelings.
I was thinking the whole time, "this person would _love_ Clojure".
https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html
I am one of these people who cannot countenance a Lisp that doesn't have `syntax-case`.
Short article. Worth reading. But all I swallowed was this one sentence.
Its the sytax. If you like semicolons, thats why you like Pascal-like languages.
[1] From Toward Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Software in Common Lisp at the European Lisp Symposium, "[Coalton] has been used for the past 5 or so years [...] first in quantum computing and now a serious defense application." https://youtu.be/xuSrsjqJN4M&t=9m14s
I agree with you further and you did an excellent promotional comment for Coalton and CL; keep doing that please. I have said many times here before that I did not like my time away from CL and Coalton makes it even better.
What really prevents people from writing in Haskell at a reasonable speed is the poor language design. Programming languages are supposed to aid in reading by emphasizing structure. It's important to emphasize that a particular group of "words" constitutes a function call, or a variable definition, or a type definition -- whatever the language has to offer.
Haskell is a word salad. Every line you read, you have to read multiple times, every time trying to guess the structure from the disconnected acronyms. It belongs to the "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" gimmick family. This is a huge roadblock on the way to prototyping as well as any other activity that implies the ability to read code quickly. And then it's also spiced by the most bizarre indentation rules invented by men.
This is not at all a problem with eg. SML or Erlang, even though they are roughly in the same category of languages.
Haskell would've been a much better language if it made its syntax more systematic and disallowed syntactical extensions s.a. introduction of user-invented infix operators, overloading of literals (heaven, why???) and requiring parenthesis around function arguments both for definition and for application. The execution model is great, the typesystem is great... but the surface, the front door to all these nice things the language has is just some amateur level nonsense.
* * *
As for the upsides of using languages from the Lisp family for practical problems... I don't find (syntax-rules ...) all that exciting. I understand this was an attempt to constrain the freedom given by Common Lisp macros, and I don't think it worked. I think it's clumsy and annoying to deal with. The very first time I tried to use it, I ran into its limitations, and that felt completely unjustified. To prototype, you want freedom of movement, not some pedantry that will stand in your way and demand you work around it somehow.
The absolute selling point, however, is SWANK. Instead of editing the source code, you are editing the program itself, that can be interacted with in points of your choosing. I don't know of any modern language that offers this kind of experience. I think, even still in the 80s, this approach to programmers interacting with computers was common. At school, we had terminals with some variety of Basic, and it worked just like that: you type the program and it instantly shows the effect of your changes. Then, there was also Forth, which also worked in a similar way: it felt like you are "talking" to the computer in a very organized and structured way, but real-time.
Most mainstream languages today sprouted from the idea of batch jobs, where the programmer isn't at the keyboard when the program runs. They came with the need to anticipate and protect the programmer from every minor mistake they might've easily detected and fixed during an interactive session far, far in advance.
Whenever I think about writing in C, or Rust, or Haskell, I imagine being tasked with going to the grocery blindfolded: I'd need to memorize the number of steps, the turns, predict the traffic, have canned strategies for what to do when potatoes go on sale... I deeply regret that programming evolved using this evolution path, and our idea of what it means to program is, mostly, the skill of guessing the impossible to predict future, instead of learning to react to the events as they unfold.
In case you're into machine learning, I'm also building something similar - a tensor-first, native Clojure-like ML framework.
Either with S9 Scheme for quick fun (it has Unix sockets and ncurses :D ) or Chicken Scheme for completeneless (R5RS/R7RS-small + modules), I always have fun with both.
Oh, and well, Forth, too, but more like a puzzle (altough it shines to teach you that you can do a lot with a fixed point). Hint: write helpers for rationals -a/b where a is an integer and b a non-zero integer- and complex numbers by placing two items in the stack for each case (for rat helpers you need four (a/b [+-*/] c/d) .
You can have a look at qcomplex.tcl (either online or installed) as an example on how can it work even under JimTCL itself by just sourcing that file. Magic, complex numbers under jimsh thanks to the algebraic properties. So, you can implement the same for yourself in some Forths, even under EForth for Muxleq. Useless? It depends, under an ESP32 it can be damn fast, faster than Micropython.
Racket:
OCaml:I mean, in Scheme it is longer to write. I enjoy Lisps and use Emacs for everything, but Haskell can be as terse, or even more terse. (Which is not always a good thing.)