Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

The Lisp language syntax is not motivated by 'ease of parsing'. It is motivated by the 'code as data' idea, which enables a lot of useful source transformations to be implemented AND used in a relatively easy way. One of the applications of that are macros.

Scheme got a lot wrong from a practical perspective. Use Lisp instead.

Type theories are over-hyped. 99.99% of all software is written in languages without advanced type systems.

Macros are nothing for 'excitement'. They are a tool. They enable the user to write source transformations, which has several applications in Lisp: control structures, compile-time computation, etc etc.

View on HN

Lisp's macros don't even get variable binding right. Treatment of bound variables was one of the explicit purposes for the development of lambda calculus in the first place. Imho if you get something as fundamental as this wrong, you don't get to play.

But Im not going to get into a language war.

Stepping back to the original point, there are other significantly important/powerful ideas in the world, and lisp users are somewhat over-the-top in their significance-to-hype ratio.

Given that macros 'don't get variable binding right', they are still amazingly useful.

> Stepping back to the original point, there are other significantly important/powerful ideas in the world, and lisp users are somewhat over-the-top in their significance-to-hype ratio.

Many of the powerful ideas in software development are available in Lisp.

I mean, a really solid understanding of substitution is probably one of the major contributions of lambda calculus. For what's effectively an implementation to get that wrong is pretty pathological. And also, there's no reason to defend it. It's a bug. Period. Yet here we are.

And there's a whole hell of a lot more in the world than software development...

To the extent that lisp captures any of these other foundational ideas/theories/techniques, type theory does better (which is what I was pre-empting with my original reference, not the role of type systems in the world of practical software development).

> Stepping back to the original point, there are other significantly important/powerful ideas in the world, and lisp users are somewhat over-the-top in their significance-to-hype ratio.

Lisp is not a version of lambda calculus. It's a programming language. Macro programming in Lisp works fine in many cases.

> type theory does better ... not the role of type systems in the world of practical software development).

Lisp is about practical software development.

Right, okay, so lisp is primarily a programming language for practical software development. That's really my whole point.

I'd argue that there are lots of other settings with ideas a powerful or more powerful than whatever it is each individual evangelist feels someone should get out a lisp. Yet none of these other things have enlightened evangelists pushing the product.

That's all I'm saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com