Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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> by people who knew what they were doing.

The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. The Lisp inventors hadn't even sorted out variable scoping leading many Lisps to have dynamic scoping which is now widely agreed to be the wrong default. Also, the Lisp-1 versus Lisp-2 split. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the first to admit.

> standard dialects

An oxymoron if there ever was one. :)

> APL was designed by a mathematician originally as a teaching aid.

...and it's virtually dead. There are many interesting ideas in there but it doesn't seem like Iverson's ideas about what is a desirable notation for thought resonated with any significant fraction of people. There were many years where APL was a standard part of a CS degree. With that much forced contact, you would expect it to have stuck around if it had so much going for it. (See: Pascal and BASIC, which punched above their weight in large part because of early introduction in schools.)

> Ada was designed in a contest by the US DoD after spending a long while collecting requirements and it was then fully specified before any implementation work was done.

Ada also has a lot of interesting ideas but... outside of the DoD, it's not exactly doing well either. It turns out that spending several years writing an enormous specification without regard to implementation leads to... unbelievably complex, expensive implementations that take years to reach the market. Who could have predicted that?

The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. It doesn't matter how nice the language is if you can't actually use it because you don't have a working compiler.

C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. (Hint: You can't.) There were many languages better than C++ designed at the time, but they didn't take off because they lacked the features we hate in C++ today. Those features existed as a path to lead the existing C programmers to C++. Meanwhile, other purer languages floated off in space, beautiful but unreachable by mortals.

JavaScript was just a sad rush job that we're all unfortunately stuck with. I agree with you on PHP.

The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge.

They at least had the advantage of not being forced to design a language for a failed startup, to be easy to learn where that's defined as resembling C, and other asinine considerations people continue to take into account nowadays.

These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the firt to admit

I'm not claiming otherwise, but the birth of Lisp was a paper written by an AI researcher that had good thought poured into it, not something meant to look like C and be good enough for whatever its purpose was on a strict time schedule.

...and it's virtually dead.

Why would that matter? Why does every language need to appeal to many people? Why is that a desirable quality? There's still plenty of APL being written. I even have an article concerning this: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08

Who could have predicted that?

Ada was designed to be implemented efficiently and understood easily. It's harder to write a good C or C++ compiler than it would be to write a good Ada compiler; there's simply fewer people doing this and GNAT is popular. The only compiler I'm aware of for C that anyone actually uses, sans the behemoths of GCC and Clang/LLVM, is tcc, and almost no one uses that. There's more Common Lisp implementations that are actually used than there are for C and the only reason you'd see more C compilers for Ada is because it's a smaller language with a standard that lets the implementor get away with doing so little at the cost of every program written in the language and because the standard for a C compiler is so low that it's expected to have bugs.

The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness.

When you start judging something in computing by its fitness, it reminds me of a virus, and that reminds me of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook and its description of C and UNIX.

C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence.

I don't know what you mean by this. Common Lisp doesn't care how code is loaded and Ada has a nice with and use system.

I do know C++ is a gargantuan language where the very grammar is ambiguous and is parsed differently by different compilers and I'm also aware it has little in static analysis due to this. Debugging Common lisp is simple due to its interactivity and Ada was designed to be statically-analyzed.

Part of why I mentioned APL, Lisp, and Ada is because I use all three of these languages. I could care less what the masses use. Do racecar drivers care about the people driving vans? Vans are more popular than racecars. Why should computing be different?

There are at least three other C/C++ implementations - AMD and Intel each have one, and MSVC. That's a total of six compilers for the language.

There are at least ten Free Software Common Lisp implementations and three proprietary ones that are still supported. There are four APL implementations, two of which are Free Software. As for Ada, I've read there are six Ada 2012 compilers, with GNAT being the only Free Software option; there are more, however, if you look to older Ada standards. It's interesting how these ostensibly more complex languages have compiler parity with C and C++ or exceed those, isn't it? I think the reason is that it's much harder to optimize C than it is more abstract languages, clearly, and C++ is simply so complex I've seen an entire company dedicated to just writing a parser for it.

As an aside, I find it interesting how many negative Internet points I'm receiving relative to the amount of responses there are. My figuring is many of these people can't argue with what I'm writing.

Software development nowadays is as much about using trendy / hip tools than anything else, sadly.

Especially web development.

Is it though?

The tooling is pretty wild and crazy but I see a lot of tools that really do solve problems.

I'll tell you why these languages like Lisp or APL or Ada aren't actually good languages.

If they were really good languages, people would not only strongly advocate for them, they would give credibility to their advocacy by writing plenty of great programs in them, even on their own time, because they are very productive in these languages. They would also create best-in-class tooling to further their productivity even more.

What actually happens with these languages is that a certain breed of highly opinionated but highly unproductive programmer gets lost in them, on their quest for a level of aesthetics or elegance or correctness that nobody but themselves actually values. They don't build platforms for others to build on, they build pillars to prove a point.

I disagree with your position that a language is good or not based on how people appreciate or use it. You're trying to tell me garbage such as PHP is one of the best languages there is, effectively.

In any case, I can still find examples of these platforms. Emacs is such a platform. For that matter, StumpWM is a platform of sorts. A nice quality of Lisp is making any program extensible with it trivially. As for Ada, governments use it for critical systems and I can't tell you the particulars of those. They use Ada because people will die if the software fails, so they're seeking quality, not quantity. You're advocating for quantity, not quality.

As for APL, you don't build platforms or such things in APL. If you don't see the beauty in APL, then that's your loss.

They don't build platforms for others to build on, they build pillars to prove a point.

First you claimed people don't build great programs in these languages, which I've shown is false, and now you're arguing that they build things, but not things someone can build on. You're conflating extensible software with quality software here.

What actually happens with these languages is that a certain breed of highly opinionated but highly unproductive programmer gets lost in them, on their quest for a level of aesthetics or elegance or correctness that nobody but themselves actually values.

That happens, less so with Ada, but why would that even be a bad thing? Is it wrong for someone to spend time working on what they view as an ideal and finished program, rather than just writing something that's already been done and requires little thought or effort on their part? It's infinitely harder, I think, to write novel programs than it is to simply implement some specification or write a copy or something else. That's what I do with my work. I don't see why you'd look down on that.

I'll let you've the last word, if you want it. I'm not interested in replying in this chain any further.

> I disagree with your position that a language is good or not based on how people appreciate or use it.

This is unsurprising.

> You're trying to tell me garbage such as PHP is one of the best languages there is, effectively.

I wouldn't go that far with PHP, it's only used in a certain (lucrative) niche and I can't think of anything great written in it.

Python is a good language that grew organically much in the way that i described.

> As for APL, you don't build platforms or such things in APL. If you don't see the beauty in APL, then that's your loss.

It really isn't a net loss, because I consider the strive for beauty in a program a fool's errand. I get to write useful things in less time by foregoing that ideal.

> In any case, I can still find examples of these platforms. Emacs is such a platform.

Let's suppose that Emacs is a great program. Most languages that are not completely irrelevant have "that one thing" for people to point to. That's not enough. Furthermore, Emacs consists of about 25% of "ugly" C code.

> For that matter, StumpWM is a platform of sorts.

StumpWM? You're quickly running out of Steam here.

> First you claimed people don't build great programs in these languages, which I've shown is false

That's not my claim. My claim is "plenty of great programs" and "best-in-class tooling". A language like Lisp excludes best-in-class tooling or good performance by virtue of its design, so all programs that are written in it have a disadvantage right off the bat.

Ada had some potential here, but it got stuck. I suppose it had something to do with too much of it being proprietary solutions.

> You're conflating extensible software with quality software here.

I don't mean "platform" in the sense of "program that I can extend". I'm talking about the ecosystem and tooling surrounding the language, its "commons", if you will.

> Is it wrong for someone to spend time working on what they view as an ideal and finished program, rather than just writing something that's already been done and requires little thought or effort on their part?

First of all, this is a false dichotomy. Secondly, a program that is ideal and finished but less useful is a poor trade-off. A program that is less ideal and unfinished but has better functionality as a result is, in my view, a better program. More importantly though is not just the one program, but all the programs that can or can not exist, based on the trade-offs you chose.

If you just want to create pieces of art that the very few to appreciate, that's your prerogative. If instead you focus on usefulness however, you can create actual wealth, for yourself and for others.

> It's infinitely harder, I think, to write novel programs...

It is indeed, but it's much harder still to also make them ideal.

> That's what I do with my work. I don't see why you'd look down on that.

I don't look down on it. I just see nothing to look up to.

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