Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by iddan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

iddan

Why do people keep implementing LISP on everything? Aren’t there more interesting things to do?

View on HN

Heavens forbid people having fun by implementing a Lisp.

I feel like these are both excellent points.

Well, I’m also learning to play the piano, and that had certainly been done before and better than me.

But the reason for both is that it’s fun and I enjoy doing it.

Because it's a good programming exercise towards the goal of mastering C, and because being a functional programming language, LISP embodies software that is easy to debug, easy to understand and easy to extend.

Yes, like implementing a statically typed language, but we all have to start somewhere.

When I took a programming languages class with Dan Friedman [0], the entire class was taught in scheme. One of our assignments was to implement a typerchecker for the simply-typed lambda calculus in minikanren [1]. I recall it being a relatively straightforward assignment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_P._Friedman

[1] http://minikanren.org/

I actually need to do this for my lisp. Do you know if that class is available online? I only found things like http://mullr.github.io/micrologic/literate.html

which doesn’t seem to do type checking.

The current version of the course is locked away on Canvas, but an older version (nearly the same as it was in 2017) is at [0]. It has all of the assignments, including the partially-complete type checker. (Look in Assignment 10.)

We spent a couple of weeks learning minikanren out of "The Reasoned Schemer", using Will Byrd's implementation of minikanren.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070610012057/http://www.cs.ind...

I've been studying this for the past day. I just wanted to say: thank you. This is the most helpful and relevant resource for my work that I've come across in some time.

I really appreciate that you took the time to send me this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com