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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I don't like about Common Lisp is the unusual names. Just on the basis of the linked page, CL21 doesn't fix that.

Take princ #"Hello, ${name}\n". Why not just use print like the rest of the programming world. Okay, some languages use writeln, etc. But princ? Why not print?

A little further down, we see while-let1. Why the number? If you want to call it "Common Lisp in the 21st Century" you need to clean up the syntax.

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As odd as it may seem, I ended up prefering car/cdr over anything else (except when access to pattern matching and destructuring). I know first/rest, head/tail or even fst/snd are clearer names, but car/cdr ended up as symbols having precisely this meaning in LISP idioms (recursion over cons-cell based lists).

My 1.5cents

car/cdr also enables things like caar/cadr, which I personally find much clearer than "headHead" or "headOfHead".

@desdiv: If you happen to read this, you appear to have been hellbanned. Not sure why. Just a friendly heads-up.

Thank you so much for letting me know! I've emailed the admins about it.

As a non-Lisper, I can assure you beyond a shadow of a doubt that having "car" & "cdr" show up in the first few sections of a tutorial is not something that wins people over to Lisp.

I don't mean that I don't understand it. I even know they come from assembler instruction names. And they still look weird to me and still have no meaning despite having read what the abbreviation expands to three or four times.

You'd be far better off shipping "first" & "rest" and whispering to the old hands that you're sure they know how to "fix" the problem in their code, than presenting new people with car & cdr and then try to wedge an explanation into a brain that just threw an exception and went "Wait, what?"

first and rest are already part of the language, no change necessary. You just need to use books that teach using first and rest instead of car and cdr.

Huh.

I like the distinction of car/cdr meaning pointers vs first/rest meaning "start of list/rest of list".

It weirded me out at first, but I came to really appreciate it.

Indeed. It lets you clearly express in code that those cons cells are actually part of a different structure than a list.

Yep. It's good to have both - the car is the first of a list, and the cdr is the rest, but a cons isn't always a list. Having first and rest exclusively would be short-changing us conceptually.

Ah, but how would you easily access the number 6 out of the nested list '((((5 4 3 2 1) 6) 7) 8 9) without one of the cute compositions of "car" and "cdr"? In this case, "cadaar". (Rhetorical question. "car" and "cdr" are neat for their cute composition, but I would never inflict that on someone first learning the language.)

    (def x ((((5 4 3 2 1) 6) 7) 8 9))

    (get-in x (0 0 0 1))

Probably botched quoting, don't know common lisp, only clojure.

One word: lenses.

And how would that look for this particular example?

Definitely not as terse but far more general, flexible and powerful. With car and cdr you're restricted to working on cons cells while lenses are generic.

Some examples (from Haskell):

    >>> ((((5,4,3,2,1),6),7),8,9) & view (_1 . _1 . _2)
    6
    >>> ((((5,4,3,2,1),6),7),8,9) & (_1 . _1 . _2) .~ 4
    ((((5,4,3,2,1),4),7),8,9)
    >>> let foo = ((((5,4,3,2,1),6),7),8,9)
    >>> foo & view (_1 . _1 . _2)
    6
    >>> let six = _1 . _1 . _2
    >>> foo & view six
    6
    >>> foo & six .~ 4
    ((((5,4,3,2,1),4),7),8,9)
    >>> foo & six .~ "abc"
    ((((5,4,3,2,1),"abc"),7),8,9)

For the heck of it, I though I'd try it in scheme with pattern matching...

  (let ((x '((((5 4 3 2 1) 6) 7) 8 9)))
    (syntax->datum
     (syntax-case x ()
       ((((_ p) _) _ ...) #'p))))

I know and agree, but they have some weird syntactic/linguistic quality:

  - both 3 letters each
  - only differ by 1 letter a|d

None of the alternatives have these symmetry, and it (very subjectively) shows in the code.

fst/rst, although having the difference in the middle also seems aesthetically appealing to me.

Neat, but unfortunately the equivalent of CADR (second item in list: first-of-rest) is then FRST, which I think would just be too easy to misinterpret as meaning "first" when reading or writing code in a hurry.

I don't know if cr shortcuts are still used often nowadays (SICP advocates for abstraction layers, accessor functions, CL has destruct-bind, and ml uses pattern matching to dig into data).

Nor do I -- but I'm pretty sure that those shortcuts are pretty much the only good reason for caring much about having names that resemble CAR/CDR in the way FST/RST do. (For any other purpose, I think FIRST/REST are obviously better than FST/RST.)

Good catch.

While writing a toy lisp I looked for other names with structural qualities, actually not names, more symbols since these weren't words.

Things like Oo/oO, xo/ox or _/__.

Its not hard to think of things that meet both of those features that are still better mnemonics for things that are common-language descriptions of what the function yields (e.g., cfc/csc or c1c/c2c for "cons first cell, cons second cell")

car and cdr are mnemonics related to the particular instruction set of the first computer on which Lisp happened to be implemented, which is great for people with a background with system programming on that system, but not so good for anyone else.

They're entrenched enough in the language that they are worth changing unless you are intentionally building a new Lisp-like language from scratch with some other main motivation and the change is just a side issue -- and it is clear that having something that doesn't imply list semantics for cons cells like first/rest does is good -- but car/cdr aren't a particularly good pair.

I know car/cdr history, and didn't like it. Only after trying clojure[1], I had a weird sensation that I was missing car/cdr and that writing in scheme felt better.

If I tried to explain deeper, Lisp focus on recursion over cons-lists was so foreign to the mainstream paradigms, that car/cdr, as most used operations, became symbolic axioms in my mind.

[1] which goes all in on the intuitive, human, pragmatic side of things, throwing away some old lisp idioms.

Yeah, I like car/cdr very much and use them where appropiate because of semantics. Indeed, car/cdr doesn't mean the same as first/rest or head/tail. E.g. head/tail makes sense only if you're talking about lists. But cons-cells can be used to compose different types of data structures.

As funny as it is, people whining about "car/cdr" and saying "language X did it better because it called them first/last, or head/tail" don't realize that it's the language X that lacks semantics to express anything else than lists using cons cells.

Yeah, lots of this is just swapping out one awkward keyword for another.

If I were doing this I'd also get rid of the * around the hash keyword and either just go with the keyword 'hash' or replace it all together with an operator.

It's almost like lispers want the opposite of java, long verbose keywords and syntax and then as short as possible variable names.

Why not switch the parens to something that's a single keystroke? Why not get rid of the parens in most cases? In some cases this seems to make the parens problem with lisp even worse?

   (loop for key being each hash-key of *hash*
      using (hash-value val)
      when (< (length key) 2)
        do (format t "~A~%" val))

with 5 sets of parens turns into

   (doeach ((key val) *hash*)
     (when (< (length key) 2)
       (princ #"${x}\n")))

six sets

the former also required fewer shift-character keystroke combinations

   ( ) * < " ~ %

while the new syntax ends up with

   ( ) * < # " $ { }

this feels like my hands are wrestling, not typing

this just seems to be moving things around, not really improving anything

I'm not a lisper, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong

> Yeah, lots of this is just swapping out one awkward keyword for another.

Many a well-intentioned Lisper eventually begins to see deficiencies where there are none and attempts to improve their implementation of choice. Common Lisp is one such target because people coming from in-vogue languages are used to the language changing every year or two. Invariably this leads to superficial changes at best which are enabled, surprise of surprises, by Common Lisp because it was designed to be extensible.

My theory is that if your language of choice needs to change its grammar rules to introduce new features you're basically admitting that you should have added macros programmatic access to the reader.

> It's almost like lispers want the opposite of java, long verbose keywords and syntax and then as short as possible variable names.

Well syntax is at a minimum in Common Lisp. It tends to avoid syntactical short-hand. The most common I know of being QUOTE, BACKQUOTE, UNQUOTE, UNQUOTE-SPLICE, and FUNCTION: ' ` , ,@ and #' respectively.

If you read the preface to the first edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs I think you will find an enlightening explanation of, Why Lisp?. To paraphrase a brief summary: there are very few ways to form compound expressions and hardly any syntax at all so that the programmer can get to the problem at hand within an hour: the language disappears.

The longer names are chosen stylistically based on the maxim that computer programs are meant for humans to read and only incidentally to be executed by a computer.

Lisps are not, contrary to popular mythology, list-processing languages. It's a symbolic language. The relationship between symbol and data allows the programmer to think primarily about the transformations to data without the abstractions becoming weak.

> Why not switch the parens to something that's a single keystroke?

You could. Common Lisp gives you access to the reader. You can write a more fitting syntax you are more comfortable with.

I've written reader macros to parse assembler instructions for an emulator I wrote in Common Lisp.

> this just seems to be moving things around, not really improving anything

That's my impression too. These sorts of experiments are worth trying from time to time in order to see if something can come from them. Maybe something will come out of this.

But ultimately people bike-shed over "car/cdr" and specialized functions for specific data-types (ie: AREF, GET-HASH, etc). You can write higher-order functions to abstract away sequence access and iteration if you want: people have and there are good libraries for it.

The standard hasn't changed AFAIK because:

1. It'd be expensive and nobody wants to fund another ANSI committee.

2. There haven't been any significant proposals the necessitate revisiting the specification.

People complain about the lack of run-time support for concurrency and IO in the specification. I don't think they realize, coming from other languages, that Common Lisp doesn't need it. The specification defines the language and a minimal ball of mud for doing practical work with it. Things like concurrency, threading, and IO are implementation issues and have been solved by high-quality open-source implementations for quite some time. We even have good libraries that provide a cross-platform layer to things like threading.

> People complain about the lack of run-time support for concurrency and IO in the specification. I don't think they realize, coming from other languages, that Common Lisp doesn't need it. The specification defines the language and a minimal ball of mud for doing practical work with it. Things like concurrency, threading, and IO are implementation issues and have been solved by high-quality open-source implementations for quite some time. We even have good libraries that provide a cross-platform layer to things like threading.

In that case, it would be useful to newcomers to introduce those facilities into the core of the language. The more batteries are included, the easier language adoption becomes.

> But ultimately people bike-shed over "car/cdr" and specialized functions for specific data-types (ie: AREF, GET-HASH, etc). You can write higher-order functions to abstract away sequence access and iteration if you want: people have and there are good libraries for it.

To me, this is not bike shedding, but user experience design. The more learning that is required to accomplish a given goal the first time, the less productive and more difficult that goal becomes. "car" and "cdr" are not intuitive to me. Why not use "first" and "rest" or "head" and "tail" for CL21 instead?

> "car" and "cdr" are not intuitive to me. Why not use "first" and "rest" or "head" and "tail" for CL21 instead?

Nothing about programming is intuitive.

The problem here is that you've adopted ideas and notions from another language and are bringing that baggage to Common Lisp. If you learned Common Lisp first you might not have this very issue you describe.

For historical reasons, "car" and "cdr" are the names of special pointers to the elements of a cons cell. There's nothing about them that have anything to do with lists. You just happen to be able to construct lists by linking together cons cells. CAR and CDR simply deference the pointers in the cons cell:

    (atom . atom)

Where atom can be a value or a another cons cell. In this visualization it's useful to think of CAR as referring to the "atom on the left" and CDR referring to the "atom on the right." One or both of those atoms could be a cons cell... so there's nothing about CAR or CDR that has anything to do with notions of "first", "last", "head", or "tail."

Those are higher-order functions for operating on linked list and are in the Common Lisp specification anyway.

Suggesting that Common Lisp should remove them is like saying you should remove pointers from C.

> Where atom can be a value or a another cons cell. In this visualization it's useful to think of CAR as referring to the "atom on the left" and CDR referring to the "atom on the right."

Then names like "left" and "right" rather than mnemonics for "contents of address part of register" and "contents of decrement part of register" would make sense.

There's nothing you can call them that will make any more sense than CAR and CDR. You can call them BOB and DOUG, LEFT and RIGHT, UP and DOWN, CAKE and DAFFODIL. It wouldn't matter. They're still just symbols to a function that deferences the associated pointer in a cons cell. The powers that be chose CAR and CDR and they're about as good as any.

The bonus discovery that the (car (cdr some-cons-cell)) could be shortened to CADR via a macro was just icing on the cake. Now we have a macro that can access any part of an abstract tree. Nice.

There's nothing intuitive about programming. There's no analogy you can apply to CAR and CDR or even CONS which will suddenly make sense to your primitive mind. You can't pick up a cons cell in your handle, fiddle with it, and throw it back at the computer. There's no analog in nature which resembles it. It's an ephemeral thing that only exists inside a machine because an idea someone had made it so. So stop looking.

If that's the biggest hurdle to learning Lisp I'd be surprised if someone could be taught to program in any other language. Try teaching C declaration syntax to someone.

    char *(*c[10])(int **p);

I can explain a cons cell in five minutes tell you that there are two functions for accessing its sub-parts and we can move on.

... to red-black trees, skip lists, linked lists, circular buffers, trieps, whatever.

Update: I don't mean to say I'd be surprised if someone could be taught to program in any other language in any sort of glib or pejorative sense. Of course one can learn to program without hearing about a cons cell. What I mean by that is it takes some willingness to accept abstract concepts and turn them into symbols in order to learn how to manipulate them.

> There's nothing intuitive about programming.

If that was true, than naming constructs in programming languages wouldn't matter at all.

> If that's the biggest hurdle to learning Lisp

Its not, its just one of many small hurdles that keep Lisp as a fairly niche language, despite its strengths when viewed from a 30,000 foot level.

> Try teaching C declaration syntax to someone.

C-family languages declaration syntax is a major factor in the popularity of dynamically typed languages (newer statically typed languages that are starting to take back some ground mostly reduce both the clutter of that syntax and the need for declarations at all.)

So, other than illustrating the a similar (but larger) problem to the car/cdr problem, I'm not sure what the relevance is.

> If that was true, than naming constructs in programming languages wouldn't matter at all.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intuitive

I think we're diverging off the track here. Naming is important. Programming has borrowed quite a lot from various places to name the often weird, alien "things" we work with. But a rose by any other name is still a rose.

There is no name for which there exists an analog in nature that we can apply to CAR and CDR. You can't think about them intuitively. As demonstrated elsewhere calling them FIRST and REST is a mistake. FIRST, SECOND, THIRD and so one are just English words for for CAR, CADR, CADAR, and so on.

So it's best not to get stuck in the "intuitive" trap. CAR and CDR have stuck around because people have argued about it endlessly for 40 years and haven't come up with a better name. They took on abstract symbols and the people writing Common Lisp code kept shipping systems.

> Its not, its just one of many small hurdles that keep Lisp as a fairly niche language

I don't think that's the reason for it's lack of market share. That has more to do with corporate politics and business. Read up on the history of Symbolics.

tldr; there were once only commercial implementations of Common Lisp that cost far too much and delivered little. Because money.

So a couple generations of programmers didn't get exposed to it as their first language.

> C-family languages declaration syntax is a major factor in the popularity of dynamically typed languages

Is that so? Why then are their interpreters and virtual machines written in C or some other language? PyPy is making an effort but even then... lots of C. Most implementations I've seen of Common Lisp are written in Common Lisp. Odd.

CAR/CDR isn't a problem. I've explained it five times in various posts on this thread. There's even a link to the HyperSpec (the HTML form of the ANSI specification). It's quite simple.

The real problem is that Common Lisp isn't the first language for most "newcomers." So they come packed with notions and biases that they forget to leave at the door. If C is your first language pointers aren't a big deal and you learn to read the declaration syntax. You know it's not great and that it's difficult to pick up but once you get it you move on. In a similar fashion when you pick up Lisp you figure out CAR and CDR.

Changing the names of CAR and CDR isn't going to make Lisp any more appealing to newcomers. You just have to learn what they are and move on.

>tldr; there were once only commercial implementations of Common Lisp that cost far too much and delivered little. Because money.

Which is complete bullshit.

What is complete bullshit? I'm told the Lisp machines were awesome but I've never had the opportunity to use one. I was only starting programming on an Amiga 500 around 89-90 in BASIC. I wouldn't even know what Lisp was until 2007-2008.

Or is my terribly lazy and misinformed history of the AI winter and the rise of inexpensive Unix mainframes inaccurate as to the reason why Lisp suddenly dropped out of vogue? I've only read accounts of it online. If you have a link to a better source I'd be happy to read it. :)

You wrote: '>tldr; there were once only commercial implementations of Common Lisp that cost far too much and delivered little. Because money. Which is complete bullshit.'

that's bullshit. Complete bullshit.

Lisp Machines were programmed in ZetaLisp (aka Lisp Machine Lisp) and Interlisp. Not Common Lisp. Common Lisp appeared later on Lisp Machines as an additional Lisp dialect and software was than gradually moved to Common Lisp.

The first version of Common Lisp was initially designed between 1982 and 1984. The defining book was published in 1984.

CMUCL, a free Common Lisp, appeared early. CMUCL was many years forked into SBCL, but CMUCL is still available today. KCL, which then was patched into AKCL, ... Which today is ECl, MKCL, GCL! ... appeared early. CLISP, a free implementation in C, appeared early.

A bunch of mid-priced Common Lisps was available for Windows and Macs.

The commercial ones for Unix were Allegro CL, Lucid CL and LispWorks. They were slightly more expensive and great.

There was always a choice of various Common Lisp implementations...

'Unix mainframes?' What is a Unix mainframe? Unix ran on various types of machines, but there was no rise of a Unix mainframes.

Common Lisp was early available with Lisp. Every major university had a site license for a commercial Common Lisp. I used CL on a SUN cluster. Steve Jobs shipped his first NeXT machine with Allegro CL included.

Common Lisp was never bound to Lisp Machines or only on Lisp Machines. Far from it. The whole idea of Common Lisp was to have the language available on a wide variety of machines: personal workstations, PCs, Unix systems, IBM Mainframes and supercomputers like the Cray.

You're right. I don't know where my head was at when I made that comment. I was totally wrong and I apologize the the parent and everyone else who came across it.

Maybe I was struggling to recall Dan Wienreb's post[0] on the failure of Symbolics and somehow confusing that with other things and not making much sense.

Thanks for clarifying.

[0] http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/11/why_did_symbolics_fail...

This is a classic: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html Also check his open code lisp section! I would like to add as somebody whose first language was lisp, car/cdr never represented a problem. It looks more balanced than first/rest. The thing that got me were emacs, SICP lectures and the whole idea of lisp writing lisp. I don't think changing syntax would help much because lisp attracts certain types of people (I believe).

> Nothing about programming is intuitive.

> The problem here is that you've adopted ideas and notions from another language and are bringing that baggage to Common Lisp. If you learned Common Lisp first you might not have this very issue you describe.

Indeed, very little about programming is intuitive to a non-programmer. You're also right about me bringing in baggage from other languages. Those are valid points, yet I would still like to see CL become more appealing to programmers from other languages, whose baggage becomes relevant to their intuitions.

> Those are higher-order functions for operating on linked list and are in the Common Lisp specification anyway.

This Common Lisp reference [1] equates "cdr" with "rest". I am not familiar with the source, so is this a good reference? If so, then I must still argue that "rest" returning the cdr of a list instead of all the elements except the first is not intuitive to me. Or maybe I am misunderstanding something. My familiarity is with Clojure, not Common Lisp, so that might be interfering with my ability to understand what you mean here.

> Suggesting that Common Lisp should remove them is like saying you should remove pointers from C.

That is an interesting point. I am not very familiar with the organization of data structures in Common Lisp.

[1]: http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-consec.pdf

>Those are valid points, yet I would still like to see CL become more appealing to programmers from other languages, whose baggage becomes relevant to their intuitions.

I suspect that's the reason for libraries like CL21.

However the specification for the language known as Common Lisp defines a language that is mutable by the user. We don't need to change the specification to experiment with syntactic changes that could benefit new users.

> This Common Lisp reference [1] equates "cdr" with "rest".

That would be a common mistake I've had to overcome when I first started learning Common Lisp. Consider:

    (cdr '(1 . 2))

What's the value?

Hint: It's not a list. So why conflate CDR with REST? They're completely different things.

    (cddr '(1 . (2 . 3)))

What's the value? Can you guess how that works? Hint... if it's a macro it might expand to:

    (cdr (cdr '(1 . (2 . 3))))

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_...

Again, not REST. Not a list. It just so happens that when you have a structure like:

    (1 2 3 4)

You can get (2 3 4) by:

    (cdr '(1 2 3 4))

But that's because:

    (1 2 3 4)

Is the same as:

    (1 . (2 . (3 . (4 . nil))))

And that is the only syntactical sugar Lisp has afaik. You could configure your printer to print out the actual cons structure if you'd like but the shorthand is useful because this data structure in particular is so eponymous.

I think the * 's around * hash* is just a convention indicating a global variable in Common Lisp.

(Edit: trying to escape HN formatting conventions.)

Dynamic variable, rather than global, but yes - it's just a convention.

Because PRINT also exists, and doesn't do the same thing PRINC does.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw61/CLHS/Body/f_wr_p...

Common Lisp has several "print" functions.See: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_wr_p...

Honestly? Mostly because Lisp conventions predate "the rest of the programming world". As for while-let1, it's a while-let with just one variable binding (I guess I'd prefer them to stick with just while-let).

There's usually a very good reason behind all those "unusual names" of Common Lisp. I don't think that dumbing things up so that they look more similar to everything else in a language that is already different from anything else is the way to go.

I do. There is a reason for the success of Ruby and Python, and why Elixir is dragging Erlang in to the present. It turns out you don't just have to write your language in the shape of the machine/vm but it can be a tool conformed to the mind of the programmer. "princ" is not easy to remember, read or associate to other things one already knows. The point of a project like this should not be to save old school programmers (who won't use it anyway) a few keystrokes, it is to throw away the cruft of decades of "a very good reason" decisions for something simpler and better thought out.

I really like the direction of this project, but I agree with the parent comment, it doesn't go far enough.

I don't know German, but I have a huntch that Romanian, my native language, is more complex than German, except that Romanian has firm roots in latin, therefore more people unfamiliar with both will have an easier time with Romanian, since we have a significant portion of our vocabulary similar to Italian or Spanish, plus we borrowed words from French, along with many neologisms coming straight from English. Just because a language is unfamiliar, that does not make it hard or complex, just because you're not speaking it.

Consequently, just because a language seems superficially familiar, that doesn't make it easy to learn - for programming languages it takes weeks to understand the basic necessities, whereas it takes years to become a master, regardless of the programming language you're talking about.

Also, Erlang's Prolog-like syntax sucks, not because it's unfamiliar, but because it objectively sucks.

This. Arguing that Common Lisp sucks because the names of functions are not sufficiently python/C/Algol-like is like arguing Chinese languages are never going to become widely accepted because they aren't sufficiently like European languages. People who argue against car/cdr are the same people who will blindly accept printf, strlen, scanf (wtf?), __le__, zip. They accept those names because they actually learned the language and discovered those were trivial details and don't judge something so superficially. (also, ~95% of common lisp names are more like with-open-file, or define-setf-expansion, or make-load-form, or most-positive-float, or standard-input, instead of, what mkStr, <stdin>, isalnum, fprintf, ? :, and the like)

No one is arguing that CL sucks, but that if you are going to re-skin the whole thing with learnings from modern languages, with features like string interpolation, then you might as well make the function names more intuitive while you are at it.

The specific example is talking about doing away with the format function in favor of the princ function. What is the argument against calling it print? No one is suggesting fprintf by the way.

You and the parent are also citing spoken languages, and certainly if you are a Chinese speaker then the difference between princ and print is going to be nominal to you. However, if you are a native English speaker, not so much. Really though, once you learn one programming language with standard library function names in English, then the second will be easier to learn if it uses similar names.

Back to the subject at hand, the case being made here is that most modern languages choose things a bit easier for the brain to parse; they aren't overly shortened, they aren't Hungarian notation, etc.. The reason for that is that it requires enough brain power to learn a new language, its structure, libraries and quirks without also having to memorize strange sequences of consonants.

Here is some code I wrote yesterday. Even if you never saw Ruby before in your life, don't know what blocks are, and have no idea what the array/enum functions are, you can probably figure out what this code is doing.

invoices = @organization.subscriptions.collect{|s| s.invoices}.flatten

current_invoices = invoices.select {|i| i.invoice_period_begin_date <= Date.today && i.invoice_period_end_date > Date.today }

current_paid_invoices, current_unpaid_invoices = current_invoices.partition {|i| i.paid?}

and THAT is why if you are designing a new language from scratch, you should strongly consider using intuitive function names.

> What is the argument against calling it print? No one is suggesting fprintf by the way.

Very simple, actually. You know the term REPL, right? It stands for Read-Eval-Print Loop, and originates with Lisp. Actually, every Lisp gives you read, eval and print functions which work closely together. In particular, you expect read to be able to understand what print outputs, because they work in a loop.

So print is already taken. As for other prin* functions, see here: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec....

There is a good rationale behind those names.

And no one uses princ for interpolated string output anyway.

As for your code, things like princ or while-let1 are more-less equivalent of @, |sth|, ?, etc. in your code - i.e. there are some basics you have to learn with every language.

> Back to the subject at hand, the case being made here is that most modern languages choose things a bit easier for the brain to parse; they aren't overly shortened, they aren't Hungarian notation, etc.

Well, you don't get closer to that goal than with Lisp and the majority of its naming conventions. From make-instance to destructuring-bind to multiple-value-bind to update-instance-for-redefined-class, most of the things are named pretty well and readable for a programming language.

I can't help but see these arguments about "intuitive names" as finding just another excuse not to learn something new.

> You know the term REPL, right?

Yes, and notice how it doesn't stand for Rrepl-Evl-Princ Loop.

> There is a good rationale behind those names.

No, there is a good rationale for having separate functions, there is no logical rationale for prin1, princ and pprint.

Let's take "prin1 produces output suitable for input to read." from the link you provided. Since we are redesigning the language anyway, let's call that evalable-print or readable-print, or anything else in the world that semantically captures it's meaning. Because when you have a language with hundreds of obtusely named library functions it requires an unnecessary amount of cognitive load added to the already taxing act of programming. Functions that are easier to remember are directly related to code that is easier to read and understand.

Well, those functions are pretty much obsolete. No one uses them. They are only in the standard for backwards compatibility (and don't use that as an argument because that is a legitimate reason and those names are easily ignored. they are not taking up a precious name-space). Everyone binds special variables like * print-readably* , * print-circle* , * print-base* which, would you look at that, have nice comprehensible names. Prin1 doesn't have any cognitive load on beginners at all since no code written after 1984 has prin1. I guarantee you that all the names _you_ would find esoteric in Common Lisp have less esoteric equivalents. (car => first, cdr => second etc..) And pprint? well, that's a commonly accepted name even in the python world for pretty-print. I guess most of the names you complain about is things that you haven't seen in Ruby and aren't familiar with. On the other hand, I can easily argue that in your code snippet above that {|i| ...} looks like garbage to me since every language _I've_ encountered uses lambda(x) = x ... or x, y => ... for something as fundamental as lambda functions. Of course, this would be ridiculous for me to argue since every language has their differences in names and syntax that simply don't matter compared to the actual concepts themselves.

Is there a reference somewhere about what functions are no longer used by modern Common Lisp programmers? That would be very valuable for someone wanting to learn more about the state of the language today, instead of accidentally stumbling upon outdated practices.

Familiarity makes it easier to learn, not easy. Just as long as you don't betray anyone's expectations about what they already know.

I remember struggling with Haskell because there is a function called 'nub', which wasn't anywhere near what I would have called the function if I had named it. Hoogle says "(The name nub means `essence'.)" In Lisp it is called 'remove-duplicates.' In Python it is list(set(x)). In SQL it is 'select distinct.'

So what advantage does nub pose? Not one of clarity, but of convenience for those "in the know." (Which is not those who are learning the language.)

nub is widely recognized to be a terrible function; it's not indicative of anything

It's not? Then I suppose princ is a fine name for a print function.

Unfortunately, name, `nub`, is the best thing about this function. It has horrible (O(n^2)) performance, and only works with lists.

Erlang, despite its fusty syntax, already feels like the future for anyone using it.

Things that made perfect sense in the 1970s, are not set in stone for all time.

In the case of Lisp those things, from the 1950s to the 1990s, have rationales. Updating the names to 2010s fashions just means we'll have something that people can't understand in the 2020s and that they can't check the history of.

So in 2020 people will have forgotten the etymology of print or format, rendering them nearly meaningless while princ, car and cdr endure?

That's rhetorical, you don't need to reply.

So you think we're better off just giving up on a perfectly good reason for these naming conventions and call "princ" "print" just because some poor language without the concept of Read-Eval-Print Loop named its function that way and then everyone else blindly followed?

Seriously, Lisp has long history and had half the "new amazing features of today" 30 years ago. There is a rationale for naming conventions. Just because you're free to call a string-spitting function "print" in Ruby or Pascal or whatever doesn't mean you can do it in a language with a proper REPL.

Yes. Of course I wouldn't characterize it as blindly following so much as being able to rationally step back with some perspective and identify some trends as positive.

Lisps are a beautiful and powerful family of languages, but you are conflating the implementation with the idea. The names of functions from 30 years ago are not what makes Lisp special.

Alternative to 'princ' doesn't have to be 'print', it could be any of 'print-out' 'output' 'put' 'write' 'write-output', and that's just off the top of my head (yes, several of these can be ambiguous and might have different meanings, but still better than 'princ').

Just because CL has a long history, it doesn't mean that everything about it has to be correct. Otherwise why start a project of CL remodernization in the first place?

"In spite of this, it has not had much success (at least in Japan)."

From this and the author's name (Eitaro Fukamachi), I wonder if he is not a native English speaker.

This could shed light on differences in aesthetic choices about function names. Difference between "princ" and "print", or awkwardness of "while-let1" may not resonate as much for a non-native speaker.

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