How I lost my faith in Lisp(groups.google.com) |
How I lost my faith in Lisp(groups.google.com) |
Perhaps his priors were a bit off (seeing Lisp as the holy grail of all programming languages), but I think it is still fair to ask why Lisp has failed commercially? This has been discussed before, however (Lisp "wars" in the 80s, AI winter, etc.)
I find the way he ends his post interesting, where he argues that Lips has to evolve and improve. The article is from 2002 and in the mean time, a lot has actually happened in the Lisp world. New dialects like arc and clojure have created a renewed interest in Lisps. It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.
(1) assumes that if a technology is good, it will see steady adoption over time. This is not true. See "Why didn't the Romans have hot air ballons" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264998
About (2) I want to phrase my criticism carefully. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ron is a generally egotistical person, any more than your typical programmer, or than myself. What I am saying is that (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. It's akin to seeing someone take a better picture with a cheap camera than you take with your expensive one, and losing faith in expensive cameras. Or like listening to someone make a song sound better on an upright piano than you make it sound on a grand piano. The Python programmers who knocked him off his high horse at Google are not proof that Python is better.
To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.
I am very encouraged by the developments of the last 9 years. Clojure in particular is a Good Thing (notwithstanding my on-going allergy to Java), and even the Common Lisp landscape to day is much improved over what it was in 2002. Clozure Common Lisp in particular is wicked cool, and I'm using it for some hacking projects on the side. But when it comes time to do something industrial strength it would still be a very tough call for me even today.
I would love to do a Lisp-based startup, and a CL based startup in particular. If anyone out there shares this interest please let me know.
"Erann Gat" and "Ron Garret" are the same person; you find him on c.l.l. regularly since 2004.
His last point, that lisp can and should be improved, is one that he makes periodically. There's a barrier to some improvements to Common Lisp caused by the fact that the standard has been long closed and doesn't look like it will be reopened, but there have been improvement in areas that are outside of the standard.
For example both Ron's extended post and the previous hn discussion of this post note the pain of finding and installing lisp libraries. Quicklisp beta was recently released which relieves a significant amount of that pain.
[1]http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Edit: I noticed this in the previous posting of this thread:
Ron> For the record, I did not submit this article, and specifically declined a request to do so. It's not that I don't stand by what I wrote (I do) but it was written for a specific audience at a specific time and I don't think it deserves the attention that it's getting now.
...
akkartik> I noticed. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang... Thanks.
TLDR TLDR Libraries make a big difference!
In other news, STFU and hack. Enough with Lisp politics posts. It's just a language.
The author of the original post made an angel investment in a Common Lisp-based startup after they went through YC.
It was again the problem that people where all trained in C/C++.
Now that's a powerful language. :)
The beginning of the article was all Lisp demolishing C and Fortran. Then he saw that Python could stand up to it. Most of the flexibility, nicer syntax and better libraries.
Lisp has stood still for the past 25 years. Is it any surprise the rest of the world caught up?
At the end when I read the comment:
> I think that if Lisp does not evolve it will die, and I > don't want to see that happen. I still think Lisp is > great. I also think it can be, and should be, improved.
I wonder what kind of improvements does the author have in his mind! If somebody knows please kindly enlighten me.
No, just a case of Stockholm Syndrome. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/d11c7e5619...
"I wonder what kind of improvements does the author have in his mind! If somebody knows please kindly enlighten me."
As Erik Naggum said: Erann Gat does not want to enhance Common Lisp, he [just] wants to feel better.
I encourage you to keep reading Naggum's line of thought: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9edc8f7ee2...
Programming languages live and die by their libraries, i.e. vocabulary. The differences in grammar are in my opinion rather small, when we talk about how expressive a clever programmer can be. Can a person be even more expressive in Lisp? Perhaps but it's not essential. The library support on the other hand is essential. You want to stand on the shoulders of giants for the next step. In all modern languages you can write elaborate, expressive libraries (read DSLs) for your pet problems.
I think my TLDR summarizes the original author's post but if someone disagrees, then we can have a fruitful discussion :)
Disclaimer I use Java and Racket daily.
Rather, I think this is more evidence of the old "Good programmers will be productive in any language." The advantage that an expressive programming language like Lisp gives you is that it frees you to think about the problem domain and not worry too much about the details of the machine. However, if you're skilled enough that you've pushed those details into unconscious muscle memory, they don't matter anyway. And a language like C++ gives you the option of dropping down to the bare metal if the need arises.
There are a fair number of Lispisms in early Google code - MapReduce is the obvious one, and there're others that I'm not at liberty to discuss. However, they're Lispisms implemented in C++, where the author took the concept and transplanted them into a language that could give the efficiency needed. This is not a bad strategy - when you understand the concept fully, you're free to tweak it and adapt it exactly as necessary for your problem.
Perhaps not coincidentally, many early Googlers were also programming language & compiler guys before Google. Urs Hoezle (employee #9 and Google's first VP) had previously done StrongTalk (statically-typed SmallTalk), Self (the prototypical prototype-based language and an early inspiration for JavaScript), and the VM that later became Java HotSpot. Jeff Dean got his Ph.D on the Cecil/Vortex compiler, one of the first optimized implementations of CLOS-like multimethods. Rob Pike worked on Plan9 at Bell Labs and invented the Limbo programming language as part of it.
One of the most complicated decisions in developing any new programming language today must surely be where to draw the line separating standard library facilities from those to be provided externally. Provide too little, and you get a zillion incompatible external implementations popping up (C++ and strings; JavaScript and DOM manipulations). On the other hand, go too far, and you get your entire community relying on mediocre facilities, or worse, multiple competing facilities in your own standard (Java and GUIs; D in general). Likewise, if you have a common repository for additional libraries, you can be too restrictive on contributions and wind up with many basics still not covered (C++ and Boost) or you can be too open and wind up with a whole load of substandard or incomplete junk (Perl and CPAN).
I should point that the existence of specific libraries can be seen as a library creation with zero effort. So heavy-library-weight Java can be seen as a very productive language, but only when you use already created libs.
The difference between languages shows when you're on your own, when there's no library or tool under your hand. When you cannot find a giant to stand on his shoulders.
tl;dr it's possible to be a Blub programmer in Lisp.
As a thought, I have sometimes wondered, why is it difficult for me to do something in Racket? It is not because a library is missing (though it could happen), but because it does not limit me. So it does not guide my thinking as much as let's say a strict language like Java.
When I don't have to think about classes with single inheritance and single-dispatch methods, I start to think about class systems, generic methods, multiple dispatch, may ditch classes altogether, go to a great unified graph of data or something crazier. I end up thinking how I should be modeling something and not doing the modeling itself. It does go overboard sometimes :)
Does anybody else face this problem?
My creation, the world's best photo sharing site, primarily uses Kawa Scheme: http://ourdoings.com/
PG's take on this subject: it's about beating the averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Edit: Yup.
http://www.flownet.com/ron/xooglers.html
So I was a little disappointed when I found out
on day 1 that I had been assigned to the ads group.
But that disappointment turned to dismay when I learned
what my assignment was to be: I was the lead engineer
on a new advertising system code named "adstoo", what
eventually became AdWords. That part wasn't so bad.
The bad part was, this was going to be the inaugural
Java project at Google. Google, which had until now
been a Java-free zone (which was one of the reasons I
took the job) was going for Java in a big way, and I,
the consummate Java hater, was supposed to be its
chief evangelist.
Just peachy.Racket has a decent repository (PLaneT) for libraries and easy ways to wrap C libraries.
I think the almost symbiotic relationship between C# and the .Net libraries today is an interesting case. It seems clear that several of the language features added to C# (or the underlying .Net execution model, if you prefer) in recent years were motivated by particular ways of working with the libraries. Usually, we see mostly one-way traffic, with standard libraries trying to paper over any cracks in the underlying language.
If you go into a significant company with any significant developer culture, they would have their own libraries and tools, which you would use because then you can deliver. So when those are written in f.ex. Python you would use it. Sometimes this also means that you use e.g. Eclipse though it has numerous problems because at least those problems are shared with most other developers and you don't have to fight them alone.
Google undoubtedly had great programmers pre-MapReduce et al. so they already had great stuff to use.
In my own perspective, "all else considered equal", things like macros, CLOS, dynamic variables and conditions system have enormous advantages over say what Python has. But this advantage can be overwhelmed by other factors, since industry programming is a very cooperative venture. (Not just cooperation with coworkers, but also people you've never met.)
(btw, that link leads to a blank page for me, so I think it is blacklisted)
No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would.
> Maybe those people are just really smart
You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.
This way your System will grow into what you want you don't have to design everything upfront thats the wrong we to go about it.
(Design is fine but on a much higher level then the object system in your language)
The code I write is usually very high-level code. It can be written like an acceptance test or feature test. I essentially try to model the business domain of the software as cleanly as possible. I might refactor the code until I can express the domain clearly, with DRY etc.
Implementing all the bits of my DSL is often then the actual problem. Often I meet areas of the domain that are tricky because I have never solved such problems before. I think only my the third implementation of some idea can be something usable. So sometimes it takes a long time to get there! :)
This is only a problem in my personal projects because, well, the main goal is to advance my capabilities and thinking and finishing the project is secondary.
Isn't this BLUB at it's finest? I can't think of X in context Y, so X is unthinkable, thus Y allows me to think of everything.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...
(Submitted to HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314572 -- but it died with a whimper.)
Unfortunately I'm not surprised it died. It's better thought out than the original Usenet posting, but less controversial.