math-dev

There is a lot of bad lisp code out there, especially these days (most open source projects in CL are more about look how smart I am but by themselves are mostly terrible code).

But I agree with your first point, the _older_ lisp programmers may very well be the ones that kept at it and honed their skills while the poorer programmers jumped ship before then

My suggestion is to find some programmers in your selected language who you look up to and learn from them how best to write code in that language

I may be generalising but I find older (40+) programmers more likely to write good code - they have all the war zone experience and battle scars

For example, in Common Lisp I am a big fan of

https://github.com/informatimago

and also Allegro Common Lisp’s open source code

I must admit, the _art_ of writing readable code really appeals to me and is one of my finest joys in programming

Would you have an example of how to do that?

Interesting - thanks for the tip!

Is it via class or functional components ?

Keep up the good work - maybe jetbrains will buy / fund you!

No I think this may be off base (but appreciate your original viewpoint) but also correct.

I think for luxury goods like artwork boats etc what you say is correct, but what I think doesn’t work is property prices. There’s no reason for the majority of the world to be struggling with rent given all the advancements in the world. it is human generated scarcity that doesn’t make no sense except to existing capital owners taking advantage of the rest

Wow!

Was in a similar position. The way I coped was not to think of the past, life’s too short to do that. Be in the present and build your future.

Also some good advice: don’t kick yourself for your decision. It was YOU who decided it that way, if you were to rewind the clocks, the same person you were before would make the same decision. That was who you were before, so never beat yourself up over it

I’m a lisper and i did roll my eyes :D

Silicon Valley was a great show

I love how negative HN is. $1k for a book and I would be over the moon

Author has a full time job, think of it as a hobby like a blog.

Instead of posting on HN daily , he wrote books and made $160k…that’s a full house in some parts…and that’s on top of a full time job so it’s pure savings…sans tax.

Not having a dig at you per se but the general nitpicking and negativity in some of these comments

Source code of LW editor is mostly available. I’ve done some extensive modifications to it (implemented VIM mode), but these days I’ve moved back to Emacs- just something I prefer more

In principle not too hard, in practice the topic comes up every few months and nobody has done it yet

All good points

I think so, try asking on reddit or IRC if you still can’t find them via some google fu

Great comment, agree a lot with this

Awesome, thanks for the links!

You bring a good point about the loop macro (which I do like too). Maybe you are right. My personal feeling is trying to do static typing will lead to less elegant code (I say less elegant, because any code that works and is fast enough is good enough - style doesn’t matter that much, esp if readability is somewhat maintained) and has more far reaching implications on a code base than the loop macro which can be isolated to a specific section.

But I get your point too, for those who crave static typing, then at least there’s something for them to try.

Those already exist and have been used by many.

Coalton is a set of macros to make it easier for to write with the safety rails of static typing.

Now if I write in Swift, for example, static typing is great, because the IDE can give a lot of hints during development. Non lisp languages have quite idiosyncratic syntaxes for various constructs, so static typing really does help a lot there. In large code bases in those languages it also helps a lot because they do not have the power of Lisp macros to reduce syntactical complexity via a Domain Specific Language.

Now with Common Lisp, with a powerful generic functions and object system, with runtime dispatch and introspection that far exceeds other languages, plus with the abstraction power of macros, trying to add static typing guard rails simply doesn’t make any sense. I rather program in TypeScript if I am so far removed from the core essence of CL development.

Each language has its strengths and the dynamic nature of CL is one of its biggest strengths (with the lack of a GUI and interop with other tools being its largest deficiencies today). Static typing in Lisp is like trying to fit a square plug in a round hole. If somebody wants so much guard rails, other languages are much more suitable because they have been designed (quite successfully if I may add) in that way.

TLDR; As per On Lisp by PG, lisp code should be built in layers over each other and hence static typing is unnecessary. Furthermore generic dispatch provides similar features to some extent (although i recommend combining with closer mop and catching edge cases etc)

Fun fact I learnt the other day browsing some historic posts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replann...

Written in Lisp at the time and widely successful to the point it paid back many times over the investment DARPA put into the language

Now the question for anyone who may know, are descendant systems still being written in Lisp?

Its not very smart to add static typing to Lisp, goes against the strengths of the language. At that point just program in another language, there’s a lot of benefit of static typing that IDEs can take advantage of but for anyone half decent at Lisp, they wouldn’t feel any need for static typing (outside of compiler optimisations, which is a different thing).

Now in terms of interesting things, check out European Lisp Symposium https://european-lisp-symposium.org/

The talks from this year were highly entertaining

The other really cool thing in CL IMO is Allegro Cache - in memory datastore that is a joy to use

For content you copied to begin with????

this was us!

My view is that math is highly expressive and constraining that expressivity through rules like don’t type |x| is not a great idea

Great post!

You should write a blog post on BBEdit to help them get more users! Do you think the high quality of cloud flare may some way have been inspired by your use of BBEdit?

Xah Lee’s tips on elisp were super useful to me. A relic of the usenet era (an infamous troll on comp.lang.lisp), but someone who has added a lot of value to a lot of lives

Long love ergomacs!

Yes if you do eventually finish, then winning indeed :)

Very useful insight / analogy. Thanks for sharing

Finish what you start is such a great philosophy - I am trying my best to do that too.