The Lush Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Lush Programming Language

lush.sourceforge.net

40 pointsorbifold14 comments

Abandoned, but large parts of this seem to be the work of Yann LeCun (https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151728212367143), Facebook's director of AI research, right?

...curious if scraped parts of this project are actually living a second life deep inside Facebook's labs :)

And Bengio and some other well-known people from the Deep Learning community. Interesting.

I sometimes wonder if there is too much emphasis on the idea of that some piece of software is abandoned. By which I mean that new and actively developed software isn't bug free and if a tool does the job it does the job. There's no guarantee that an active project in version 0.9 is going to fix any particular bug soon short of me [in theory] fixing it myself.

It's not as if much has changed in 2015 that would introduce show stopping bugs that weren't around in 2009. The process is the same, evaluate the tool against the problem domain and compile from source if it seems like a reasonable fit. Active development doesn't change the fact that there is no silver bullet.

You're right in general, but it seems that no language that is being actively used by a non-trivially sized community ever sits still. The more we use our languages (computer or human) the more they evolve. They are a form of communication. We are always evolving our communications methods and wanting more ways of expressing ourselves.

1. ANSI Common Lisp is nearly 25 years old.

2. Picking up another language is the quantum leap in the possibilities of expression. Point releases aren't. To the point, if Lush expresses what a person wants to express, then it does so. It's not like people suddenly turn around and rewrite working legacy while loops as list comprehensions just for fun.

His lab now uses (and contributes to) Torch7:

http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/25lnbt/ama_...

I used Lush for my homework as part of the Machine Learning course at NYU (taught by LeCun). It was pretty mature, mostly bug-free for general use. However, at that time, I never used a lisp-y language before that, and found it quite difficult to do my homeworks. It had an interesting mode where if you annotate your lush source-code with type-hints, all your Lush transpiles in to C, which you can compile with your favorite C compiler. It was eventually abandoned in usage because Torch (Lua based scientific-computing platform) was adopted by the lab.

AFAIK, Lush is not used inside Facebook labs.

Project seems dead (last "news" from 2007). However if the feature list is accurate they invested a lot of time in building this. Makes you wonder why it was eventually abandoned..

the last code update seem to be in 2014 http://sourceforge.net/p/lush/code/HEAD/tree/

so maybe its not fully abandoned

Typically that is produced by lack of paid projects using it

there are so many lisps out there, i wonder when one will click

this site of course is linked to one arc, which i believe at least the original hn was created in, i am not sure if it still is

there is also racket, which is lauded by many, and i believe deservingly so

then there is clojure, which seem to have had the best chance to make a popular lisp, but i am skeptical it actually will (at least for some definition of popular, clojure is somewhat popular, but not at the scale of top languages, like java, c#, ruby, etc ...)

this language description look (surprisingly) very promising, focusing on pragmatic features like performance and integration with other systems, makes you wish it worked out better for them

anyway, good luck for all the lispers out there

> there are so many lisps out there, i wonder when one will click

I wonder if one ever will. Just as Tarver's Bipolar Lisp Programmer[1] finds it so fun and easy to reimplement things in Lisp rather than get work done with existing libraries, it's more fun, and easier, to reinvent Lispy languages than to get work done in an existing Lisp.

It was more fun to design & implement Clojure than it was to improve ABCL[2] and get work done; it was more fun to write racket than to get work done in Common Lisp; it was more fun to reimplement swathes of Common Lisp in Scheme than to just get work done in an existing CL implementation; it was more fun to build arc than it was to just get work done.

Rather than building small integration layers over necessary technology and then getting work done with it, we continually reinvent the entire stack because it's so easy and fun to do that in a Lispy language.

[1] http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

[2] https://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/

Looks like it is (was?) targeting roughly the same space as Julia.

Lots of 404 errors when trying to access links (like the tutorial).

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