few other good languages have had that said about them:
ml
prolog
apl
forth
they all 'ruin' your life by showing you everything's wrong about daily realities.
oh, and smalltalk
PS: if I missed some, tell me
ml
prolog
apl
forth
they all 'ruin' your life by showing you everything's wrong about daily realities.
oh, and smalltalk
PS: if I missed some, tell me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
One of the first workstation OSes written in a memory safe systems programming languages, early 80's at Xerox PARC.
If I remember correctly nobody outside Xerox used Mesa or Cedar or any of the other amazing things at Xerox because Xerox never sold them. You must have worked at Xerox.
I went to Apple after Xerox and programmed in C++ using a pretty bad development environment. I certainly missed Mesa's exception handling and development environment. Mesa was missing garbage collection as did C++ at the time.
Had UNIX been a commercial product from day one, there wouldn't be any clones to start with, as they were mostly bootstrapped by the free beer source code that was taken via backup tapes from Bell Labs into a couple of collaborating universities.
Hence why AT&T went after BSD afterwards, when the the context changed and they were allowed to sell UNIX at market prices.
I agree that "the context changed" - IIRC, when the AT&T consent decree expired. That was 1982. Sun Microsystems was also founded in 1982. It was based on BSD, which had to go through the lawsuit to be proclaimed, essentially, a cleanroom Unix.
When Sun licensed from AT&T, (early 90s?) it was (I presume) at market price.
All that detail doesn't change my point: People cloned Unix because they wanted Unix. There wasn't a Berkeley VMS, not just because VMS was expensive, but because nobody wanted VMS that badly. (Why clone the thing you're getting for close to free, anyway? Doesn't it make more economic sense to clone the thing that you can't afford (VMS or OS/360), and pay the nominal price for the almost-free thing?)
People cared about Unix in a way that nobody cared about VMS or OS/360. Perhaps the ability to see the source code was part of that. But the story you're telling seems far too simplistic.
Which was with the tapes that flown out of Bell Labs into several universities and the commercial licenses that were almost gratis, given the price difference to other OSes.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/licenses.html
People keep reinventing history as if UNIX won based on merit, when it was licensing that made all the difference.
Like the fairy tale that before C no one ever did a high level systems programming language.
Small piece of history - Cromix was written single handedly by Roy Harrington who left Cromemco to found Informix.
Having said that - Mesa/XDE was awesome. I am sure Mesa/Cedar was even better.
I think you keep reinventing history as if licensing was the only thing that made the difference. I think you are badly mistaken. The licensing may have made it popular with the university crowd, but it didn't do much to move the workstation customers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/this-man-invented-the-digita...
But I’m sure senior management collected their fat salaries and performance bonuses as-per always, so that’s alright then.
I think it comes down to these languages are mostly used by enthusiasts on their own projects, without the daily realities of evolving business requirements and a legacy code base built by mediocre developers.
"Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....
Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?
Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."
-- Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
-- C. A. R. Hoare, Turing award lecture in 1981,
It was a big mistake from US government to have forbidden Bell Labs to be able to sell UNIX on its early days. C only got widespread because it had a free beer compiler and OS to back on.
Or that C hardly has a place on Windows, ChromeOS, iOS, macOS, Fuschia, Android, beyond legacy Win32/POSIX APIs?
So C caused everybody to get a lobotomy? C caused all the existing literature to disappear? How did C do any such thing as this quote is saying?
The only way the quote makes any sense is if C made people to decide that automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, and automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine were not actually the direction that we should be going in. I deeply suspect the "We're on the right path; all those others are fools who have been led into temptation" view of the history of computing. Just because of how comforting it is to those on the minority path, it is suspect.
Imagine if upon purchasing an automobile you had to agree that if the wheels fly off and the engine explodes and you all die horribly in a hurtling ball of glame, you (or your estate) have absolutely no rights to sue the manufacturer for that outcome. Look at the Ford Pinto, look at Merck’s Vioxx; look at every bit of employee and customer safety legislation written over the years and why it got written in the first place. Now go read your software EULAs, and explain to us how a culture of shameless recklessness borne on zero liability is so positive for progress again?
As I’ve said before, geeks are not the only ones to blame for this, but they are the ones who actually enjoy it this way.
C is this brilliant awful crazy-successful hack, yak-shaved into existence just to bootstrap an entire brand new OS (UNIX) in record time; subsequently Peter-Principled into domains it really has no business being in (basically anything userland). This is why, fifty years on, we’re still fighting memory corruption and security holes and generally doing an awful job of parallel computation and everything else C is not very good at.
Everyone should learn C, if only to understand where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we should be trying to go in future.
Languages like Lisp and Forth and Smalltalk are fundamentally different beasts to Algol’s descendents.
Most developers, having being raised in a pure C/Algol culture, give no thought to the base complexity and limitations inherent in those languages; they just assume that is how computation is.
What the Lisps do is reveal all that complexity and limitations to be artificial constructs, imposed by the designers of those languages, whether as convenience to implementation (as in C, where features like flow control statements map closely to underlying machine instructions) or simply because that’s what they’re already used to (c.f. 90s scripting languages like Python and JavaScript, born on the back of mature, ingrained C culture).
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Here’s a question to get you thinking: Why do Algol family languages have hardwired flow control statements? Not because that’s how programming needs to be, but because that’s how they’ve always done it. Often there’s some special-case behavior involved, e.g. deferred evaluation of operands, as in the case of conditional (`if`) statement bodies, and hard-wiring that particular special-case into the language guts is a quick way of addressing that need.
Heck, even traditional Lisps (1 & 2) are guilty of hardwiring hackery (don’t let its uniform syntax fool you: Lisp is ridden with special forms, including conditionals). You have to go to something like John Schutt’s Kernel language to see that problem solved correctly, by extracting the special-case behavior (lazy evaluation) into a general, reusable feature. Schutt calls it “vau”, but it’s just a way to dictate how and when arguments should be evaluated at the language level, instead of baking that behavior into the language implementation where it can be neither modified nor reused.
What’s the upshot? Well, first, you realize that 90% of what Algol languages treat as core features aren’t “core” at all. They can be pulled out, generalized, and expressed as plain old composable functions.
Suddenly your “core language” collapses from something big and complicated, with dozens of special-case features baked in, each with its own special syntax and behavioral rules, down to something ridiculously simple: an evaluator, a mechanism for composing behaviors (functions with vau support), and maybe some primitive datatypes to get you started (although even those can be pushed out into libraries if you want), … and that’t it. It is the mother of all refactorings, and it reveals the simple truth.
All those features and complexity the Algols had us believe were essential prerequisites to computation and programming… all gone, pushed out to external libraries which the user can freely import, modify, replace, or ignore as they need. Once you realize how small, simple, and elegant computation can (and should) be, you’ll wonder what the hell all that vast intricate pomp and ceremony is really for, and who it really serves.
Programming languages are big and complicated not because that’s how they need to be but because nobody tries to make them small and simple. But as Tony Hoare said:
“There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.”
So if a language already falls in the latter camp, then Dog only imagine all the software subsequently written in it!
This is where C falls outwith its original purpose, and it’s telling that subsequent popular attempts to fix it have done so by adding even more complexity on top, e.g. C++, Java, Swift. (It’s only recently with the likes of Rust that trend has started to reverse, but Rust is still a Complex language compared to a Forth or a Smalltalk.)
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Now, there is a tendency in Lisp circles to rave about macros as if they’re the True Revelation, but they’re not. The revelation is when you realize you have the ability to reshape a language you are given into the language that you need; a language that precisely and concisely expresses the concepts and behaviors that are of interest and relevance to you in your particular problem space. Lispers describe this as “bottom-up programming”, but the term hardly does it justice.
Find yourself writing “if not TEST do ACTION” a lot? Extract that out into your own first-class “unless TEST do ACTION” command and use that going forward. Want to evaluate commands non-sequentially according to your own [e.g. priority-based] rules? Done. Don’t want loops? Leave them out.
When you write an “Algol” program, the language always controls how your program is evaluated. If you don’t like the way it does it, tough. When you write a “Lisp 3” program, you get to control how your program is evaluated. You aren’t stuck with a fixed language-level set of first-class flow control statements that may or may not meet your needs, plus a weak second-class user-level mechanism for kind of creating your own (C-style functions, with their inherent limitations). There’s only one level: everything is a first-class feature, whether it’s provided by the language or added by you.
..
We often think of C as a “general-purpose language”, but I think this is wrong and unhelpful. We should really think of C as a DSL, one created specifically for bit-twiddling and crude algorithmic number crunching (which is what it’s good at). The true general-purpose languages are the meta-languages, because they have the power to be whatever we want them to be.
Working in C, you always speak in C. In a “Lisp 3”, you can speak in any language you like; you just have to grow that initial minimalist foundation of key building blocks into the language you want, and then off you go. It is the difference between Algorithmic Thinking and Compositional Thinking.
Yes, algorithmic thinking has achieved a lot in the last 50 years, but the software we’ve built that way has a lot of problems—safety, reliability, scalability, learnability, verifiability—that I strongly suspect are inherent to that approach. We really need to try compositional thinking to escape that trap, but we can’t even start to do that while the languages we commonly use (Algol family) are themselves fundamentally crap at compositionality.
--
Lastly, I think Nile (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844088) requires an honorary mention in parent’s list; not because of the language itself but because of how it’s constructed: not only is it a composed language, but the language it’s written in is a composed language too. If that doesn’t melt your mind at the possibilities, nothing will!
Exposure to Lisp is useful, not in that it’ll suddenly make you want to use Lisp yourself but in how it makes you realize just how crushingly, squalidly “Plato’s Cave” the entire Algol-descended language world really is. And disaffection is the first step toward change and improvement; just don’t expect those comfortable in their chains to welcome it.
People will fill in gaps, so it depends on what gaps are left and how big they are.
Your argument is a common one, but it’s founded on a flawed premise: that Algol-language users know what they’re doing. Sure, they can read and write code written in that language, but how many of them actually understand the problem domain in which that software ostensibly solves problems. Truth is, a lot of programmers today are simply faking it: they don’t understand the business; what it does, why it does it, why it does it the way it does, and what the problems are that it has doing it. They know how to write code, and that’s all they know; or are interested in knowing.
For that type of programmer, rolling language constructs for the sake of rolling language constructs is simply a way to make themselves appear busy and productive without actually having to produce anything of value. Because to write useful code they’d have to learn the user’s business first—and that’s exactly what they want to avoid, because they hate having to learn stuff they’re not interested in and really don’t want to do it.
Take away the Lisp and give them an Algol; won’t make a blind bit of difference. They’ll still churn out the same endless makework, only this time it’ll be expressed as vast convoluted pointless class hierarchies and reams of autogenerated boilerplate. (You mention Rails: Worst Offender Ever.) Idiots will write useless code in any language.
Business accepts that type only because it doesn’t realize how bad it’s being scammed by them; which often as not is because the managers responsible for running that business are an absolute bunch of know-nothing bullshitters themselves.
..
The only people who will benefit from Lisp expressiveness are those who appreciate that the language itself and the code written in it is the least important part of the whole process. Because what they’re interested in is understanding and solving the users’ problems, and if they have in their toolkit the ability to construct a language that talks in the language of the business itself then so much the better for solving it.
You don’t have to be a great programmer to do this, and do it successfully too. (I’ve done it, and I’m a bear of very little brain.) You just need to understand the business itself; to get in the shoes of the folk who do those jobs day-in day-out and walk around in them till you see their world as they do. Once you can speak the language of that business well enough to “pass”, making a machine speak that language too is NBD. And once the machine speaks it, well, there you go. Cos that’s not a language that bangs two rocks together. That’s a language that lays a six-lane freeway in fresh-baked tarmacadam, all painted and ready to roll.
Code is not the product. Code is just tedious crap you have to wade through on your way to the product. As a developer, nothing pleases me more than not having to write code; or at least no more code than is absolutely unavoidable.
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Those Nile links are good ones, I do recommend following them up. How to write a graphics pipeline in a hundred lines of code. Imagine if every program we wrote was like that, even programs that currently run to tens or hundreds of thousands of lines in those familiar “safe” Algol languages.
That’s what we should be shooting for in this profession, cos I dunno about you but I’d rather learn to read a hundred lines of code written in a custom language that’s tailored to that domain than 10,000 lines in a lowest-common-denominator crapfest like C++.
The work that Piumarta and Amelang et al did on STEPS is totally underrated. It has been quite sobering to watch these ideas go ignored by the larger community.
For the other truth is that most people just plain don’t like change, least of all radical change. And programmers are no exception. I mean, they may fancy themselves as brave pioneering visionary techno-utopians building this wonderful new world for everyone, but truth is most are so reactionary ultra-conservative they’d make your crazy John Bircher great uncle blush, and the only future they’re building for everyone else is the one that looks exactly like their own past. Because that’s where their comfort zone is, and that’s where they intend to keep it.
Me, I don’t have a comfort zone to preserve: I’m completely uncomfortable everywhere in life. But it is, at least, liberating. :)
--
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
That Nile/Gezira has languished is especially tough, but I think that's partially because Amelang had some personal troubles [1]. Note that at the bottom of that Github issue there is a link to a recent talk by Amelang in which, eventually, he talks about a new language he is working on called Bert or something. I'm thinking it's a next-gen follow up to Nile.
I mean, any one of FAANG alone could easily run a PARC or VPRI just off loose change in their kitchen kitty. And sure, it’s totally speculative blue-sky R&D that might [probably] never pan out; yet if no-one ever splurged on such gambles now and again we’d all be here having this argument by parchment and quill pen instead!
We learn by trying and failing, not by being afraid even to try. And in learning we succeed.
† lambda-the-ultimate.org
Spare me your smug condescension. Your position is founded on a flawed premise.
You're in the minority for a reason, and it's not because you're smarter (or because you "get it" or "understand what matters" or whatever). Lisp is not the one right way; it's the right way for some problems and some circumstances. And the same is true of C. Pick the right tool for the job, not because of a worship of one tool. C is more often closer to the right tool than Lisp. That's the reality that you're trying to ignore with your "C users don't understand" rationalization.
Now, if you wanted to argue that C is overused, that in some circumstances where C is chosen Lisp would be a better choice, that would be a reasonable argument. But "C users just don't understand what matters"? BS. You need to get over your blindness.
And then you blame the users for “not speccing the job right” when they discover your “solution” not only fails to make their lives any better but often makes it even worse. I’ve worked a decade professionally as a user-turned-developer, so please don’t say this attitude isn’t cultural right down to the bone. I’ve seen it, I’ve dealt with it, I’ve walked out because of it. And looking around me that seems pretty much par for the course.
This is why I like a philosophy of reshaping your stock language into something that much better expresses the business concepts and processes you’re dealing with, then writing your solution in that. It forces you to learn the user’s job before you get underway, because you can’t fake understanding: your new “business language” either does the job or it sucks.
Building up that vocabulary is the first test of whether or not you understand what you’re doing; and until it proves you do you’ve no business proceeding or you’re just wasting everyone’s time (including your own), and giving this industry an even worse reputation for shafting the customer by giving them shit than it already possesses.
--
† Ironically for exactly the reasons I’m talking about: you’re unable to see anything that isn’t about coding. But the code is the least significant part of the overall puzzle; and until you understand the puzzle in its entirety you’re not fit to solve any of it.
TL;DR: I may be nuts, but I ain’t what’s broken.
But I think you're overselling Lisp in this context. The kind of programmer you're talking about, given Lisp, won't develop a "business language" that matches the user needs. They will at best just develop a language that matches the product manager's feature request description, and at worst they'll just start hacking away in Lisp without developing any vocabulary at all.
And I think you're misreading where I'm coming from. I can see a lot more than just the code. I totally get that delivering what the user needs is what counts. Just one example: In a hallway conversation, I said we should do X instead of Y because it would be better for the users. The better part of a decade later, I got reminded of that hallway conversation, because it turned out that a litigation-happy competitor had patented Y, and in a court case wanted to apply that patent against us, but couldn't because we didn't actually do Y. I said that the attorneys should say that, if our competitor had patented delivering a worse user experience, they were welcome to the patent on it.
What are methods and classes in a language like Java? Those are "roll your own constructs" as well.
In lisp code you can define your own functions and macros, yet the end still looks like lisp code.
However, as even some Lispers will admit, Lisp itself is not a good Lisp.
Just like the Algols, Lisp 1s & 2s are riddled with special forms (they just hide them better). e.g. You can’t implement your own conditional operator in Lisp that replicates the behavior of Lisp’s built-in `if` operator, because `if` requires that its second and third operands be lazily evaluated, and Lisp itself always evaluates operands eagerly. Thus that special-case lazy evaluation behavior is hardcoded into Lisp’s core for just that operator.
However, there’s also a great saying (coined by Pythonistas, not Lispers, ironically) that “Special cases aren't special enough [to break the rules].”
And indeed, with just a little bit more thought and effort, all those special cases wired into Lisp’s core can be completely eliminated and replaced with a single general-purpose compositional mechanism that works the same for everything and can be used by anyone. That’s what Schutt’s Kernel does (my own Lisp-inspired kiwi language also solves it, albeit in a different way): it allows procedure writers to control exactly how and when/if each argument to that procedure should be evaluated.
In the spirit of Lisp 1s ands Lisp 2s I’d describe Kernel-like languages as “Lisp 3s”, in that a single fundamental change to the core language improves its simplicity, consistency, and uniformity. What’s really significant though is that it vastly improves language plasticity, i.e. the ability to reshape bog-standard Lisp into whatever custom language best expresses the concepts and behaviors specific to your problem space.
We talk a lot in software development about managing complexity, and indeed this is important. But the one thing that’s even better than managing complexity well is eliminating it entirely.
Lisp culture gets plenty castles-in-the-sky brainfarts of its own, natch, but at least the Lisp philosophy offers the opportunity in a way the Algols never will. It’s the question every Lisp asks, all the way back to McCarthy:
How simple can/should computation be?
(Answer: A lot simpler than we think!)
And then, having arrived at the answer to that, figure how to simplify it even further.
Now, if only someone could find a solution to all those Irritating Stupid Parentheses… ;)
No, that's wrong. The number refers to the number of namespaces. Lisp-1 is a single namespace, and usually refers to Scheme. Lisp-2 is two namespaces, one for function names and one for variables that are non-functions. Lisp-2 is typically Common Lisp.
However Common Lisp is a lisp-n, it has at least 5 namespaces: functions, symbols, keywords, classes, signals, packages...