I have realised recently that there are much more concrete barriers to creative expression in coding: many of us are carrying around iPhones that you cannot write applications for, even for yourself, without paying a $100 a year fee. All the ways the language makes you feel means little compared to whether or not you can actually write code for your computer. The person who makes the computer can decide if you are allowed to be creative with it. And, as a society, we have decided (or perhaps been implicitly brainwashed?) to not want to be creative with our computers. In such a situation, the distinction between Java's OOP and Lisp's "computational ideas and expression" means very little.
A bit of a "Stallman was right" moment for me.
Also looping back to the article, it speaks about how lisp and smalltalk have fallen out of fashion which can explained by the more ultimate loss of permission and desire for creativity
[0] - I really typed C+ and not C++ on purpose.
Now I do not mean to be rude, but I want to really drive a point home: what you are saying sounds to me like "Advances in medicine are not so relevant, because medicine is too expensive, and people in Africa cannot pay for it anyway".
You are mixing 2 totally independent things. That Apple exist, with all the bad things (and also the good) has nothing to do with how a programming language is designed. And all things being equal, people can feel more freedom to express their programs in one or other language, independent of what platforms are avaialble to later deploy them.
Note that while today Apple exists, there is Linux, which you can really do anything you want with, with total freedom (except of some little places with blobs if you are purist) but again, nothing to do with programming languages.
If the king banned painting and someone wrote an article comparing the creative differences between oil and watercolour, I would also then point out that the difference is minute compared to the king banning painting
And that there is a country where painting is allowed does not mean it is not a major restriction for so many of us, or indeed we should not be so individualistic to say “just move”. I care how it affects others, not just me
A good example is the web. When it was given to us by Tim-Barnes Lee, the web was a free ecosystem with a simple markup language. But companies like Google decided that this was not a good thing, and now to develop a simple web site you need to know dozens of technologies, otherwise your web page will be considered outdated and disregarded by web search engines.
The same process happened to programming languages, only the ones that could be molded to the needs of large companies were deemed to be "good".
I also don’t like the hurdles of writing private Apple ecosystem apps. Apple may fix this via Playgrounds, not sure though.
I feel captured by Apple’s ecosystem, and that is not a comfortable feeling. Also, Richard is right, we just don’t listen.
Take the issue of freedom of speech. While it may be legally protected to various degrees, with the US having one of the strongest protections, is it practical when all communication happens on private platforms with opaque filtering ("moderation")?
I see the same thing in programming freedom. Android might technically be "open source" but it is no more practical to actually hack the software on your Android phone than an Apple phone. Similarly, PCs might be available that are under the complete control of the owners, but you need to be an expert programmer to realise this control.
Lisp is simply a more practical language to begin hacking. Emacs is probably the best example. Everything is there to make it easier to hack. It's not just technically free, it's practically free too.
I don’t begrudge Franz and others their licenses, but what happened with the LMI and Symbolics IP is a cultural disaster.
Lisp is the №1 enabler of Stallman's “Freedom 1”. Smalltalk might be close but I can't really say, and it doesn't look like I can install Pharo on my Android device. Nothing else even comes close.
The OP is wrong about creative freedom being overblown. Lisp gives you creative freedom - if you choose to accept it.
How it became XEmacs, what the Cadillac protocols remind you of on a famous editor currently, the infrastructure for a image like development environment for C++, all around early 1990's.
You can do introspection and access the variables at runtime (using a horrible syntax), but that's it.
I don't see much artistic aspirations in the language or in its creators. Ruby already has a much better metaprogramming story and the code looks more elegant.
> Python looks like an ordinary dumb language, but semantically it has a lot in common with Lisp, and has been getting closer to Lisp over time.
> They might even let you use Ruby, which is even more Lisp-like.
It's a bit sad to see that the book he's referring to at the end is a book released in 2003, to which this is the foreword.
Lisp is an incredible experience to write and experiment in, unlike any other language I've ever worked in.
Still, I believe there are many people out in the field that are mostly about "just delivering the spec" or about making money; pragmatists who care not too much about the art behind the software, and I suspect that will always remain the case.
Craftmanship marrying art and mastery is a niche, but that doesn't mean it's not thriving in spaces for enthusiasts.
Seconded by an enthusiast posting on a site written in Arc then rewritten in SBCL ; )
I think that the experienced of Smalltalk is very similar in some ways, despite the languages themselves being very different. At the end of the day I prefer Lisp, in large part because I feel that it interoperates with the rest of my system better (I could be wrong — no doubt expert Smalltalkers have figure out solutions to all the issues which annoyed me once upon a time).
They’re both roads not taken. It’s sad, and I think that our industry would be in a much better position had we not wasted decades in the C trap. But history unfolded as it did. Maybe it had to.
Lisp cannot be completely redefined. You can’t avoid parentheses, and if you stray too far from common idiom, you’re no longer writing Lisp, you’re writing something else using Lisp syntactic forms.
Well, you can with reader macros, assuming you’re willing to consider an init file that you only look at when you write sufficiently avoidant.
It’s not done though, because experience has shown it’s not really worth it.
I disagree here. To take rhyming as an example. It's possible to have a poem where every line rhymes AND a poem where there is no rhyme at all. It's not as simple as saying 'okay the lines in this text don't rhyme so it can't be a poem'. The same is true of the things like spacing and meter. These are all massively variable, and the result doesn't even have to be bound by the usual rules of grammar. English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.
For me the defining feature of poetry is that the form and nature of the language used in a text may suggest meaning over and above what the individual words say. This definition is subjective, and suggests that the poetry is in the eye of the beholder, but is more honest than a simplistic checklist of features to look out for.
This whole poetry topic is really besides the point anyways.
> English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.
I don't feel like you are actually addressing what I'm saying, so let me reiterate it more clearly. I'm not making any assetions about the absolute creative power of lisp or writing. It is the author of the article who points out that lisp's distinguishing feature, compared to other programming languages, is it's ability to specialize and mutate its own verbiage/syntax to better fit certain problems or modes of thinking. I am simply pointing out the irony that this charactistic of lisp also distinguishes it significantly from natural language, even though the author is attempting to argue that programming lisp and writing literature are similar.
I think one can argue that LISP is the "best" computer programming language based on a set of metrics that revolve around simplicity and composability. There's no simpler language. There simply cannot be, because there's nothing "extra" in LISP. It's the most compact (while still being human readable) way to define and/or call functions.
You can also argue that LISP is closer to English than any other programming language, because in English we use parenthesis's and lists to enumerate things related to what has been said. For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name. But "add" is a name one can read. Also "add one and two" is a valid English sentence, so all LISP programs are similarly valid English language expressions, where the parenthesis is merely used for grouping language "clauses".
If the world were ever to be forced to agree on one single high level programming language, it would necessarily need to be LISP for about 10 other huge reasons I could name: Everything from ease of writing parsers, to compression of code, simplicity, ease for learning, even as a young child, etc.
Given that most people alive today don't understand English at all, I don't think this claim holds up very well.
> For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name.
I'd be willing to wager that "1+2" is understood by far more people across the globe than "(add, 1, 2)".
* I never said LISP format was widely understood.
That was unclear given you kept calling out English, and not natural or human language more broadly in the rest of your comment. But I'll go with it.
> all my words in the literal sense, everything I said is still literally true.
No, they aren't. You need to make a stronger case than "Because I declared it axiomatically true".
+ has become part of nearly every language already, what's the value of picking one word (add) from one language (English) to replace it? Or to be more generous to say that every language should substitute for + whatever their language's word is. Now they can't communicate without a translator. Or, they could just use + as has been done for centuries. Why make things harder on ourselves?
So what about RPN? What about Forth and Postscript? Just as simple... just as terse... just as efficient... just as general.
And, for me, just as unreadable.
All RPN does is replace the easy to get right parenthesis with difficult to get right newline characters.
And I include myself in this.
Remember that for a lot of ordinary people, school algebra is almost impossible to follow and is the reason they stop studying maths as soon as they can. And that is simple infix notation.
Riddle me this then: When editing code full of parentheticals, why do devs find it helpful that IDEs can find and highlight the matching opening/closing parenthesis automatically? I mean, based on your logic, parenthesis just don't make things any easier, right? I'll leave the topic of "indentation" completely off the table too, because a single riddle is enough.
Me personally? I dislike them both. I find them both unreadable.
But both are compact and efficient... just really difficult.
You are trying to put words in my mouth that are not there. That is very rude. Do not do that, ever.
But also, as you have been throughout this thread, you are wrong.
Think about it: the entire class of error of mismatched stack height doesn't exist in Lisps.
There could be an operand stack, if the Lisp is translated to a stack-based byte code; but it's managed so the programmer isn't concerned about it.
((a b +) (a b) add defun)
(((list pop) print) list while)
"A to B wo tasu, A to B no paramēta no aru, 'add' to iu kansuu wo 'defun' shite."
"lisuto wo 'pop' shite, sore wo insatsu shite, lisuto ga kara de nai aida ni"
Interesting things happen. When we think about how 'add' is called, we follow it from right to left, contrary to the direction of speech of the Japanese sentence. The function add is called, the (a b) parameters receive argument values and the (a b +) is evaluated.
However, the chained application expressed by nesting, which people complain about being backwards (so they need to invent piping/threading macros to go left to right) now reads left to right! We do have to evaluate the while condition first, but then the pop and print to left to right.
But seriously, yeah computers are naturally 'Stack Machines' [almost] always, where they need the arguments pushed onto a stack before the 'verb' is executed.
So if we translate that sequence to language, stating the operands before the operation does follow the non-negotiable evaluation data flow.
I guess you have not gotten into stack or array programming languages yet?
Forth is insanely compact and then there is APL which is a complete other ballpark.
Or check out Rebol for a homoiconic language in a very different syntax.
Lisp is amazing but oh boy there is whole other world out there. It is just one possible local optima. One that I personally love but not the only one.
This is the point I take issue with. I agree with you that lisp is the simplest and "best" programming language. Unlike lisp, there is no clear "best" natural language that is more simple and composable than all other natural languages (I know that's not what your claiming, just pointing that out). The dimension of your "best metric" for language is pretty bizarre though; all you are saying is that spoken/written language, in general, is better than grunts and pointing. If you actually compare the space of natural language and the space of programming languages, which is much more interesting imo, I think you would have to agree that non-lisp programming languages are more similar to natural language because their development was more practical and unprincipled than lisp.
Since the word "best" always gets everyone's dander up on HN, I was very careful to point out we have to define our metrics (of comparison) before we can use that word, and that's precisely what I did.
This is especially insane when talking about English. What English? American English? What group? African-American English that introduces whole new grammatical concepts? Indian English? Even two people grown an raised in London can have wildly different ways of speaking depending on their class backgrounds and many other factors. There isn't one English.
And it is ever evolving. Shakespeare English is vastly different than 21st century English. In fact Shakespeare himself invented roughly 1.7k words that we still use today.
It is super common for authors to introduce new words or bend the grammar. Again, bloodydamn Shakespeare invented so many new words! Oh, and bloodydamn is such an invented word from a very contemporary and popular book series called the Red Rising series. You don't even need to be high brow to invent new words and get away with it.
I urge you to explore more literature and poetry. There is more to English than what they teach you at school.
That's not at all what I said in my comment and I'm not at all refuting your point that languages change and can vary depending on who is using it.
No, it hasn't. None of it has, ever.
So far, you have been wrong about writing, about human language (specifically, English), about programming languages (specifically, Lisp and Java), about poetry, and about the rules of English and how they're set.
I am intrigued. Is this performance art? What next?
Are you denying that dictionaries and comprehensive books on English grammar exist?
As for being able to make words mean different things and break grammatical strictures; that’s called poetry when we do it in English. And yes there is bad poetry, but some is superlative.
[1] https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/LWRM/html/lwref...
I think the author examining the fads of agile or XP would draw quite opposite conclusions if they observed programming as a social activity, building a shared knowledge and understanding that is constantly refined before it is "abandoned" as a piece of software.
WRT the earlier comment, I don’t see anything in RPGs writing that assumes solitary development
None that worked well. There is a reason Git took over this space. Git is to 2005-era version control systems what Google was to Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista.
> and collaboration online was rather mature
As someone who experienced this era first hand, I respectfully disagree. Online collaboration was certainly possible, and it certainly happened, but it was not even close to what I would call "mature". It was a colossal PITA. Again, there is a reason that Linus wrote Git, and it was not just that he was bored and needed something to do. He needed a tool that would make remote collaboration on the Linux kernel less of a PITA. And he succeeded quite spectacularly.
These days I mostly write Go for work, and as I’ve gotten older, I no longer find the act of programming profound. I take more joy in hiking and kayaking than programming, since LLMs have commoditized something that used to be gatekept to the teeth.
I’m glad that AI tools have trivialized many parts of the act and let people focus on the result rather than the process. Kind of like how good linters completely killed off the bike shedding around code aesthetics.
That said, nowadays I appreciate tools that last. Languages that take backward compatibility seriously and don’t break user code on a whim. Languages that don’t support ten ways of doing the same thing. Languages that don’t require any external dependency managers or build tools. Languages that are fast, have less syntactic noise, and let me do my stuff without much fuss. So to my eyes, those useful languages are the most beautiful.
So Python, with its bolted-on type system, no built-in dependency manager (uv doesn’t count; there will be more unless they put it in the standard toolchain), and a terrible type checker, doesn’t really appeal to me anymore.
I’m sure anyone could write a beautiful ode to any language of their choice and make something profound out of it. If I could, I’d probably write an ode to Go.
I don't see any LLM commoditization and I can't apprehend your point of view that programming was guarded by gatekeepers. The past 20 years have been an explosion of systems, open code, and languages. Where do you get this point of view from?
This worked for OSS corporate employees who pretended to promote equity while always keeping their own leadership positions.
Since the layoffs, corporations stole all open source code via "AI" and are now selling it back to the authors while humiliating them ("you have been gatekeeping!").
Totalitarian projects like CPython, whose "leaders" jumped on any corporate bandwagon and have yelled "gatekeeping" on any occasion, are now guarding the leftover places and the GitHub lock icons have increased exponentially (many of them have been fired).
As you say, all of this is just self-serving propaganda and there has never been any real gatekeeping in programming. especially when compared to law or medicine.
I can't see how, in 100 years (or maybe even just 50) humans will still need more than ONE computer programming language. Or at the most two. We might always need C++ to exist for low level stuff, but we only need ONE higher level language.
Not really.
I know people think they are... but then some people think water can magically be imbued with healing powers.
Here's how that works:
https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
LLMs are 99% hype. They can't think, or reason, or count... or program.
What makes you think I can't?
https://leaddev.com/technical-direction/ai-models-cant-under...
https://www.codeflash.ai/post/llms-struggle-to-write-perform...
https://community.openai.com/t/llms-seem-to-be-flawed-at-the...
It's late, I couldn't be bothered to search for more than 30 sec.
Your statement is as incorrect as your others.
That is the core position of all religions. Faith over evidence.
1. Is it any good, though? Does it work well?
2. Is it better than you could do by hand?
3. Do you care that the vast environmental footprint of the racks of servers that are vastly inefficiently wasting energy to do your job for you – badly – are destroying the planet and meaning that my child has no future?
Because I care a lot about that.
In the past several weeks I've accomplished what would've taken me several YEARS to do, pre-AI.
But throughout this thread you offer no evidence, no citations, just your own extremist unsupported opinions, mixed with ad hominem abuse. I am done. If I knew how to block people on HN I would block you.
In Python, I have to really get on a roll on a project in it, to where I can ignore most of the unfortunate aspects, that are apparent when having to Web search through writing and code that seems 99.99% by people who wouldn't be doing this if it didn't pay money. Many are skilled and professional and conscientious, despite the circumstances of it being a job, but that's not the norm.
In JavaScript universe, jeebus, you can't read about even the smallest things, without it cavalierly telling you to install a supply chain disaster from NPM.
In Rust, some of their linguistic thinking is appealing. They still have the positive-employability problem, :) but the difficulty has a gatekeeping effect that isn't entirely unwelcome (if you only want a job, just learn JavaScript or Python). I can foresee flexing some of my systems programming skills like I haven't been able to as much in Python, JavaScript, or Scheme, to build efficient and trustworthy software. But then, for example, the other day, I thought "I'll try this UI package, which is a wrapper around a platform Web rendering widget, since maybe they found a sweet spot..." But somehow, "hello, world" requires compiling 503 Rust crates, just for the wrapper alone, not counting the code for the non-Rust platform Web widget that the they wrap. We already know that the platform widget is going to be buggy with memory errors and design flaws, and we're going to be running bloated Web stack atop that widget, and with callouts to Rust code, and how many people in the world can even reason about debugging that (or auditing it!), just to display simple GUI widgets in a fashionable way.
One of the reasons why I wrote 42links in Lisp is that it’s less likely to end up in a ChatGPT reply without any license hints.
noelwelsh•7mo ago
Douger•7mo ago
noelwelsh•7mo ago
EdwardCoffin•7mo ago
fuzztester•7mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
kragen•7mo ago
Douger•7mo ago
As a complete aside, I thought your writing here http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/ was helpful. And I now know about BNF!
kragen•7mo ago
Thank you very much!