“GnuCash […] is designed to be extensible by end users. The unfortunate part is that the extension language is Scheme […] Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp; the number of people who know it well is sure to be small.” https://lwn.net/Articles/925782/
I think something the scheme community could learn from Haskell is to lean-in on it's prestige. I see so many people post about how they were never able to figure out how to use scheme in any practical way, and most schemers I've spoke to said it took them about a year to get really compfortable. But I think the #scheme community has traditionally advertised it as "so easy, you can learn it in an afternoon!", and so people, often times already coming from some other #lisp like #clojure, expect to be able to just pick it up, and when they fail to they think the language is lacking. But nobody comes to #Haskell with such expectations, and the Haskell community never advertised it as super easy and quick to learn. In my experience, Haskell has always been sold as "takes time to learn, but is worth it".
「 Now, before you go out and write your next project in Lisp, you should keep something in mind. Lisp is not the fastest or smallest language out there, it was not designed to be so. There are some pretty good implementations of Lisp out in the wild, but don’t expect them to outperform C, Go, Lua, or even Python most of the time 」
via brycevandegrift.xyz
#lisp y #gopher show w/ screwtape as named by gef in about 4.75 hours #music original electric by noted kiwi https://cyanmentality.bandcamp.com/
Clarifying my thoughts on why current generative AI are bad #gopher examples of my bunny hopfield nets with memory collisions, but higher polynomial update functions spacing the memories out removing the collisions. Pictures and ASCII. STILL WIP. #lisp discussion of the great commentary I got on my failure to TDD, a bit on interlisp and git.
It's an incredible historical archive on Lisp systems and dialects with a focus on Symbolics Lisp Machines. It hosts countless manuals, research papers and publications, screenshots, videos, source code, documentation, articles, data, links, and other rare material.
Why in #SICP the word "procedure" are used instead of "function"
It's seems a bit confusing. As I remember, term procedure is about just an action, some effect, without returning a value (aka void function). #LISP always returning the value, ok, but... why do not use the word "function"...
Otherwise why do not use word "procedure" if there's no procedures in (probably only my) classical definition
Medley Interlisp has the most tightly integrated combination of system software, application platform, programming language, development environment, tools, and runtime platform I've ever experienced.
A rare "whole greater than the sum of its parts" level of synergy mostly seen only on Smalltalk workstations and Lisp Machines.
#Lisp(s) are the only programming environments that enable a prototype-to-production development cycle for non-trivial projects in a way that is predictable.
To be fair, I think Haskell will continue to fill the niche it filled ~10 years ago, around the time it started to get mainstream hype. Small teams of skilled devs delivering robust products that would normally require much larger teams to maintain will continue to prevail. Purely functional lazy programming was never bound for world domination in an economy which is antagnostic to curiosity, creativity and truths.
On the other hand, I have the feeling that we're going to see more and more Haskellers-turned-Rustaceans come to realize that #Rust does little to alleviate the primary barrier to Haskell's wider success -- fast and predictable turnaround time for projects developing cutting-edge technologies -- and will wind up going the same route as some major Haskell projects such as #Unison and #Idris have in recent years, which is to try #Chez Scheme, only to discover that it allows them to release blazing fast functional programs on a generic foundation where major breaking changes are practically non-existent, providing incredible flexibility while significantly reducing dependencies by dint of the ad-hoc tooling that falls out of the bottom of #scheme. Not to mention the joys that come from near-instant startup times, some of the fastest compile time you've ever encountered, fully-customizable interactive development and a surgical #debugger that rivals Haskell in scheer fun. Yesterdays naysayers will become tomorrow's enthusiastic bootstrappers. Or a at least a boy can dream.
That said, in all seriousness I don't think Scheme will ever reach the heights of Haskell's moderate commercial success. But I do think that projects built on Scheme, like Unison, will get a leg up and eventually surpass it, and interest in #lisp will only grow.
My 18yo nephew asked me what my favorite #ProgrammingLanguage is and I don’t actually know the answer.
I use#C and #Go for applications. I write #Python for data munging and scripts and small apps. I’ve written many thousands of lines of each. I sponsor #Zig.
Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" (1991) is always worth a re-visit.
It's a fairly succinct and technical reflection on why worse design design decisions often win. It also encapsulates why we're all using Unix and Windows running C code rather than more advanced and elegant #Lisp machines.
@schmudde@evanwolf "Lisp, face it, is used for advanced research and development in AI and other esoteric areas. It has weird syntax, and almost all other computer languages share a non-Lispy syntax. Syntax, folks, is religion, and Lisp is the wrong one. Lisp is used by weirdos who do weirdo science."
that's extremely dogmatic (literally so), for someone who is attacking someone else for being dogmatic. otherwise i was finding it ok.
I'm a wierdo. I don't have a problem with that. And yes, I think that most of us who discover #Lisp and fall deeply in love with it are weirdos.
You only need to look at a fern, or a cloud, or a tree, or a human hand, or water curling in vortices off a rock, to know that God is a wierdo too: the universe is written in recursive functions.