Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Daniel Lyons <fusion@storytotell.org>]

Let me be a little pedantic.

On Sep 4, 2009, at 2:18 PM, Eris Discordia wrote:
> Above says precisely why I did. LISP is twofold hurtful for me as a  
> naive, below average hobbyist.

FYI, it's been Lisp for a while.

> For one thing the language constructs do not reflect the small  
> computer primitives I was taught somewhere around the beginning of  
> my education.

Like what? The if statement, which was invented by Lisp? The loop  
statement, for expressing loops? It sounds like you got a dose of  
Scheme rather than Lisp to me.

> For another, most (simple) problems I have had to deal with are far  
> better expressible in terms of those very primitives. In other  
> words, for a person of my (low) caliber, LISP is neither suited to  
> the family of problems I encounter nor suited to the machines I  
> solve them on.

This hasn't been true for a while. Common Lisp is a general purpose  
language like any other. The only thing I have ever found obnoxious  
about CL was the filesystem API. Most CL implementations are compilers  
these days and they produce surprisingly efficient machine code. The  
Scheme situation is more diverse but you can definitely find  
performance if that's what you're eluding to.

> Its claim to fame as the language for "wizards" remains.

I think this has more to do with Lisp users being assholes than  
anything intrinsic about Lisp. This is one of the nice things about  
Clojure. It's a break from tradition in this regard, as well as many  
others.

> Although, mind you, the AI paradigm LISP used to represent is long  
> deprecated (Rodney Brooks gives a good overview of this deprecation,  
> although not specifically targeting LISP, in "Cambrian Intelligence:  
> The Early History of the New AI"). One serious question today would  
> be: what's LISP _really_ good for? That it represents a specific  
> programming paradigm is not enough justification. Ideally, a  
> language should represent a specific application area, as does C,  
> i.e. general-purpose system and (low-level) application programming.


It's as though you have the up-to-date negative propaganda, but not  
the up-to-date facts. Lisp is "really good for" the same kinds of  
things other general purpose languages are good for. The main benefits  
it had in AI were features that came from garbage collection and  
interactive development. You get those benefits today with lots of  
systems, but that doesn't mean they aren't still there in Lisp. An  
advantage it has these days is that it produces code that performs  
better than, say, Python or Perl. I definitely would not call being a  
"general purpose system" and suitability for "application programming"  
a "specific application area." This is like saying agglutinative  
languages are worse for conquering the world with than isolating  
languages because the Ottoman empire fell before the English empire.

Please don't interpret this as "Lisp kicks C's ass." I'm saying,  
you're only seeing the negative half of the situation, and seeing too  
much causality. I think it's mostly happenstance. Lots of languages  
succeed despite having a killer app or app area. Python's a good  
example. Isolating the exact ingredients for the success of any  
language is probably impossible. I'd say only with C is it really  
clear what led to success, and it wasn't exclusively features of the  
language itself (though it was a part of it), but also that it came  
with Unix along with the source code. If the quacks had chosen C  
instead of Lisp for their "AI research" perhaps C would have taken a  
big hit during the so-called AI winter instead of Lisp. Perhaps if the  
Lisp machine vendors hadn't misunderstood basic economics so  
thoroughly, their machines would have become more common and taken  
Lisp with them the way Unix brought C. There are simply too many  
variables to lay the blame at Lisp's alleged functional basis.  
Especially today when languages like Haskell exist that take  
functional so much further they make Lisp look like a procedural  
language by comparison.

—
Daniel Lyons