Style, or lack thereof in Graham's ANSI CL
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From: Tamas K Papp on 17 Dec 2009 03:47 On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:02 -0500, Rahul Jain wrote: > ccc31807 <cartercc(a)gmail.com> writes: > >> I have noticed this about CL in general and in Graham's book in >> particular > > Huh? how is that a sensible phrase? Graham is opposed to CL in general. Where did you hear that? Tamas
From: joswig on 17 Dec 2009 04:16 On 17 Dez., 09:47, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:02 -0500, Rahul Jain wrote: > > ccc31807 <carte...(a)gmail.com> writes: > > >> I have noticed this about CL in general and in Graham's book in > >> particular > > > Huh? how is that a sensible phrase? Graham is opposed to CL in general. > > Where did you hear that? > > Tamas From Paul Graham... For example his talk at the ILC in New York a few years ago was mostly about how much he dislikes CL (the audience loved that ;-) ). I guess there was a bit 'rebel' attitude, but he was explaining lots of language design that was opposed to CL. From long identifiers vs. short identifiers, no CLOS, ... etc.etc. - think On Lisp applied to design a language -> Arc. You can see what kind of code he wants to write when you look at the arc example source code.
From: Tamas K Papp on 17 Dec 2009 07:23 On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:16:46 -0800, joswig(a)corporate-world.lisp.de wrote: > On 17 Dez., 09:47, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:02 -0500, Rahul Jain wrote: >> > ccc31807 <carte...(a)gmail.com> writes: >> >> >> I have noticed this about CL in general and in Graham's book in >> >> particular >> >> > Huh? how is that a sensible phrase? Graham is opposed to CL in >> > general. >> >> Where did you hear that? >> >> Tamas > > From Paul Graham... For example his talk at the ILC in New York a few > years ago was mostly about how much he dislikes CL (the audience loved > that ;-) ). > I guess there was a bit 'rebel' attitude, but he was explaining lots of > language design that was opposed to CL. From long identifiers vs. short > identifiers, no CLOS, ... etc.etc. - think On Lisp applied to design a > language -> Arc. > > You can see what kind of code he wants to write when you look at the arc > example source code. Maybe that's what he says to market Arc to people who don't know anything about Lisp except that they dislike it for some vague reason ("So you don't like CL? Me neither! That's why I created Arc, which is so totally different that it would take maybe a whole lunchbreak to implement as a thin layer on top if CL. We are on the same side! Come try my new language!"). But he wrote 2 books about CL, which is pretty weird if he hates it. One can of course argue that he started hating it later on, but that doesn't compute either: writing even a single book should be enough to realize that you hate something. So I still consider it as a pose. And I don't think that CL-bashing gets him very far: I wouldn't be surprised if the Arc fans ended up using CL in the long run. Tamas
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 17 Dec 2009 09:02 On 2009-12-17 03:47:29 -0500, Tamas K Papp <tkpapp(a)gmail.com> said: > Where did you hear that? straight from the horse's mouth: "I think we may have made a mistake in thinking that hackers are turned off by Lisp's strangeness. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the real problem with Lisp, or at least Common Lisp, which is that it sucks for doing what hackers want to do. A hacker's language needs powerful libraries and something to hack. Common Lisp has neither. A hacker's language is terse and hackable. Common Lisp is not. The good news is, it's not Lisp that sucks, but Common Lisp. If we can develop a new Lisp that is a real hacker's language, I think hackers will use it." from: "http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html" Not that I agree with him about these supposed faults; I don't. -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 17 Dec 2009 15:27
"joswig(a)corporate-world.lisp.de" <joswig(a)lisp.de> writes: > On 16 Dez., 22:12, "William James" <> wrote: >> a = %w(1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 >> � � � �35 37 39 41).map{|s| s.to_i} > > wait, in Ruby you can't write a vector of numbers??? > Nice! You can. But you cannot expect William to know how to. Besides, it's harder to write vectors of numbers in Ruby than in Lisp, you have to use brackets with sharp corners instead of the smooth parenthesis, and to spread it with a lot of thorny commas. Passing thru such a string allows him to get closer to lisp syntax, to the price of Greenspunning some parsing. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ |