6thaccount2

Notably missing:

APL (Dyalog), J, Prolog, Rebol (Red is on the list), PicoLisp, Racket, Factor, 8th (Reva was mentioned and that was the creator's prior project), and Haskell.

Maybe most of the above are too mainstream for the list.

I'll have to check out the Atom and VSCode options. Thanks for the heads up. Basically all I need is paredit, some basic intellisense, and be able to see the project heirachy.

I like the idea of Clojurescript, but don't currently have any reason to do web development.

I recall he was big into SBCL, but most IT organizations wanted all code to run on the JVM or CLR. So he had to make a Lisp to run on the JVM and Armed Bear Common Lisp apparently wasn't exactly what he wanted.

I want to learn Clojure, but there are definitely some road blocks. I don't have the time for Emacs, it'd be a pain to get a Cursive license (although the cost is extremely reasonable I'd have to do paperwork at work), and I don't know the JVM or Java well.

Can you give me the ELI5 on STM & the Actor model? The article points out why Actor has issues, but I don't fully understand STM.

Ah thanks!

Wait...are you Emily Short? Or were there multiple authors for that work?

Oh wow...I've never gotten around to playing with Inform7, but always meant to and have played a lot of games written in it. Emily Short is a big favorite of mine.

Funny thing is I always assumed it was already open source.

Is he still in jail? I thought he was caught ages ago and had a sentence less than a year?

I remember reading about his talk on living in prison...30 years in nature and then absolute filth.

Thanks! I only looked at it a little awhile back, but thought it was really cool...as a newbie I need more of an intro text to leverage it.

The creator of Factor left years ago to work on Swift I think.

I think it is still maintained, but slow releases.

This seems somewhat ironic to me. If what everyone assumes (that he's used many tax shelters and loop holes to avoid paying significant taxes) is true, it would be pretty hypocritical.

Thanks for the lengthy reply. I'll have to give it a try at some point.

Even as a current non user I'm always super stoked by the large effort put into these projects and wish you the best!

First of all, thanks for doing this and making it free.

I do a lot of shell based work (Linux commands, Awk, Python, Perl, and Powershell) and Lisp has always interested me, so this may scratch an itch.

How easy is this to get setup? Just a few binaries?

Also, one barrier to me has always been learning lisp as it is very different from most traditional scripting languages. I took a look at your examples and it looks neat, but a little complex. Is there a tutorial document that goes over the main functionality and commands. Like with Linux, knowing grep,cut, sort, uniq, cat, and a few others can take you a long way. I should add that although I haven't coded enough lisp to get competent, I've read two books on Common Lisp and have played with Chez Scheme, Racket, and Clojure...so I get the concepts with CONS/CAR/CDR...macros...etc.

I know there are a few users on HN that use Datomic (including Rich Hickey).

As someone who uses a Relational database everyday, can datomic keep up performance wise with Oracle and Postgres and how long does it take to learn the non-SQL query language?

I'll add that being able to do programmatic things in your query language that SQL can't do without PL-SQL is pretty cool. I only really know of Kdb+ and Datomic that can apparently do those things. Thinking in only terms of SQL is really limiting to me.

Not sure why I got downvoted here, so I'll explain that Mathematica makes a really good proxy for this.

I can do a decent amount of this in Notebooks or the terminal with Wolframscript and I'm not limited to simple things either.

I'm sure this tool is better if you just need something really simple as it is much cheaper and certainly lighter weight than Mathematica.

I usually use Mathematica for this kind of thing.

Thanks for the reply!

Could you use it as a desktop computer?

Gotcha

Dumb question, but what is this for?

That might be a niche within a niche.

With the advent of Learn You a Haskell, Real World Haskell, Haskell Book...etc, I really feel it is a lot more popular now, but I don't have your experience to draw upon so maybe it is just cognitive dissonance on my part.

I doubt Paul Graham was into the theoretical programming scene in that era. He might have been aware of it, but I doubt it was as production worthy as Common Lisp and thus probably not worthy of his time.

Yea, but Haskell didn't really become mainstream to those in the niche programming community until much later (~2012? certainly not 2003).

This...like most John Oliver episodes makes me scared for the future.

Oh I have no doubt that the cheap license is to get folks hooked, but as I said, it is not where they make money.

A single user license and a few toolboxes brings in more cash than all the student licenses my University probably used that year.

Ah. That I would agree with. The rest of the packages don't impress me as much.

Well...the reason is APL can't do scientific computing well.

It doesn't by default have scientific libraries and builtins for solving equations. It has a fast interpreter, but scientific computing often needs much faster.

It was also late getting off the mainframe.

I really like APL, but it doesn't have the horsepower for my needs.

Which ones? They seem pretty overpriced for what you get. IMO Mathematica is a better bet in most cases if you don't want Python or Julia.

I think it is actually prevalent in a lot of industry. They don't make a lot of money off academia with those ~$30 student licenses.

Not OP, but I can guess.

D has a built-in GC by default and doesn't force you to manage memory like Rust. Also, the author mentioned that D is pretty straightforward to anyone with some basic programming knowledge (think C, C++, Java, and C# which fits the majority of coders). Rust is very different from those languages. My main goto language is Python and I can understand D a lot more than Rust which confuses me to no end (disclaimer: I'm a total noob).

Go is probably as easy to read as D if not more and is also GC and fast. It is also very spartan. I bet D has a lot of additional features.

That sounds like far too much to deal with.