freenode/#lisp - IRC Chatlog
Search
6:58:33
no-defun-allowed
Outside of technical issues like the isolation model, I dislike Unix because a. how you expect to use it doesn't correspond to how you should use Lisp - I read tutorials where the author wrote "Oh, SLIME and Emacs and all that shit? Don't need it. Just use vi to write the file, and then run 'sbcl --script file.lisp'", and I know that they have screwed over their readers; and b. it's presented as an improvement over
6:58:33
no-defun-allowed
Windows or macOS, and then you need a kick in the stomach to consider that you might want to improve on that, too.
6:59:18
no-defun-allowed
The former is often blamed on Lisp ("guis this is why Lisp isn't popular, we just need to take away the part that makes people want to use it"), but I choose to blame it on Unix.
7:00:45
beach
There is no file system because there are no files. But one could be written of course.
7:00:57
no-defun-allowed
The "converse" of that would be why I wouldn't write a Unix clone in Lisp; you lose the dynamics and the abstraction that Lisp facilitates with a kernel-userland split and processes, respectively.
7:02:54
moon-child
(It's probably worth noting that lisp vs unix is a flamewar that goes back decades, and that if I defend unix I'm mostly playing devil's advocate)
7:03:31
moon-child
zacts: so, not 'just' data structure; *more* data structure, a superset of those exposed by hierarchical FS
7:03:51
no-defun-allowed
Data isn't real, but objects are. For the purpose of avoiding another flamewar, that is a joke, but I'm otherwise dead serious with that statement.
7:03:52
zacts
moon-child: I'm not trying to argue lisp vs unix, but I'm just trying to understand this.
7:05:13
moon-child
no-defun-allowed: data is not well-defined in a vacuum, but can be real under some interpretation. (I guess maybe that's what you mean by object?)
7:07:13
no-defun-allowed
Yes, I mean exactly that. If you know how to interpret it, then you've cut down on the difficulty of {backwards, forwards, cross} -compatibility quite a bit. And I wish some of the people who write up articles translating bare data structures would find that out; but they probably wouldn't have much of a business if they did.
7:08:45
no-defun-allowed
The problem is then interpreting how those operations correspond to each other, which is also hard, but in my opinion more manageable.
7:12:44
zacts
moon-child: lisp sounds like a more natural medium for learning some of these concepts than C I'm guessing? but good to know.
7:14:20
no-defun-allowed
Oh, also b. makes for very stupid "experts" sometimes. Like an article I read where the author thought that Unix was the first operating system written in a high level language, and that Java is the only language where objects aren't represented as hash tables. But I don't think I can really pin that on Unix.
7:18:58
beach
no-defun-allowed: Yes, the book by Tanenbaum and Bos mentions that, and also that they consider it impossible to use a language with automatic memory management to write an OS.
7:20:00
no-defun-allowed
beach: Oh dear. I was referring to <https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/13/your-language-sucks.html>, which if I may paraphrase the title, "sucks and doesn't matter". But they probably fall for the same stuff at the end of the day.
7:23:59
zacts
beach: could sicl or closos make use of something like the netbsd rump anykernel to run on existing hw?
7:24:52
no-defun-allowed
(For reference for the comment on Java, the paper introducing "maps" in a Self implementation by Ungar, Chambers and Lee was published in 1991, as well as The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, which of course has storage vectors.)
7:26:01
beach
zacts: I don't see any reason for that. The "bare metal" aspect is fairly simple to realize, and not terribly interesting. The interesting part is the interface between an application and the system, and between applications.
7:26:42
beach
zacts: And SICL bootstrapping is just going to generate an executable, for Linux for now, since that's all we have.
7:31:01
zacts
so the "bare metal" aspect would be similar to how adding a new architecture to llvm is just an implementation detail, and it's not the overall system.
7:34:01
zacts
my point being, that porting sicl to a particular platform or whatever, would just be a particular implementation detail. it's not what makes the system interesting in itself.
7:37:50
zacts
anyway, lots to learn. I'm going to pick up this practical common lisp text for now I think.
8:00:13
adlai
srandon111: loke[m] forgot Clozure CL, an implementation that is quite portable, and has a compiler that runs quickly and produces reasonably fast code
8:01:01
adlai
ACTION usually recommends CCL for beginners because the compiler is fast enough that, for interactive programming at the repl, there is pretty much no noticeable compilation delay
8:18:24
adlai
it is amazing how an unexpected escalation of formality can be a wet blanket to one's hubris, although that is off-topic.
8:20:42
adlai
zacts: allow me to add an anti-recommedation for Godel, Escher, Bach, unless you are also a fan of classical music, douglas hofstatder, or even both
8:21:44
adlai
ACTION is a fan of Hafstadter's works -- that is how he first read about lisp! -- although there are excerpts from the book that give you an idea of the whole thing while leaving you precious hours free for, I dunno, reading CLHS?
8:22:23
Lycurgus
dumbass video games: lack of sophistication, human conversational agent, the opposite of that
8:23:26
adlai
apparently that book is considered a "cult book", similar to cult movies, where people tap out early if they are not hooked; which is a shame, since it is written as a book that expects the reader to read the entire thing, as opposed to e.g. a standards document.
8:26:47
ck_
his book of essays (Metamagical Themas) is more suited if you don't want a cover-to-cover experience. There's also more usage of lisp in it.
8:27:13
adlai
ACTION had just taken an entire semester of java, before reading Metamagical Themas over the summer and encountering lisp. life could have taken a severely different turn!
8:27:27
ck_
Oh look, it's on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/MetamagicalThemas . I should donate extra to them this year.
8:27:44
flip214
I quite liked GEB... it's on my technical top-10 list, along with "Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
8:28:52
flip214
ck_: " The item is not available due to issues with the item's content. " when trying to download an ebook?
8:29:52
adlai
no-defun-allowed: that's understandable; one of the few long conversations I had irl about cl ended with the other person (also a programmer) concluding that learning such a powerful language is a bad life decision, because then most other encounters with human technology will consist of disappointment
8:30:32
no-defun-allowed
Well, sure, that describes it. And that you also may have standards for the presentation of the course that also are not met.
8:30:45
adlai
although, he seemed to be at the end of his active programming career, and thus able to make such a statement.
8:33:43
flip214
OTOH, especially in IT there's _so_much_ disappointment when dealing with other people's stuff... my own stuff I expect to break (or at least can guess when), but commercial software should behave better
8:33:51
ck_
I've watched a few older talks this year, one Keynote by Guy Steele (From 2013 I believe?) where he implores "can we please get tail calls in JDK 9?"
8:36:28
Lycurgus
https://github.com/fargonauts there is a lisp version but the main deal is pythong apparently
8:38:11
moon-child
ck_: I have found it an endless source of hilarity that guy sat on the design comittees for common lisp, scheme, java, and c
8:38:19
Lycurgus
the reason people burn out and have negative attitudes about software development (in comparison with other professionals fields)
8:38:42
adlai
beach: I think it is a common attitude among those who are seeking careers working as fungible programmers in a variety of enterprises, as opposed to those for whom 'career as programmer' could plausibly include a decade working alone, another decade doing academic research, etc
8:38:44
no-defun-allowed
adlai: Then make them not disappointing. How to do that is up to you, but you are likely as capable as as your colleagues to make the field better, and you may have a better idea of what would be better.
8:40:05
Lycurgus
which mode of society/production, determines the greater and lesser snake pits of industry/academe
8:41:46
adlai
no-defun-allowed: here's one impossible... I wish all the hi-tech managers got together and decided on programming practices that kept their employees as fungible cogs, without limiting the choice of programming language
8:41:47
no-defun-allowed
I won't say what exactly, but "just" invalidate the assumptions that your statement has.
8:46:14
adlai
in Earth, we've had a century of capitalism, communism, and hegelism, and it has given us Common Lisp, Racket, and most importantly, Stalin; whereas in the other planets, they've had five billion years of peace love and no complaints, and what do they have to show for themselves? not even a cuckoo clock, just a bunch of epicycles.
8:50:27
phoe
"in Earth, we've had a century of capitalism, communism, and hegelism, and it has given us Common Lisp, Racket, and most importantly, Stalin"
8:51:24
adlai
'stalin' is a scheme ~compiler~, not interpreter, supposedly one that reached new heights of whole-program optimization.
8:55:34
adlai
back to more productive topics, what is the best overview of the new package naming conventions?
8:56:01
adlai
ACTION keeps seeing references to [a] package-local nickname library[ies], and never bothered studying this
8:58:23
adlai
ACTION reads phoe's article https://gist.github.com/phoe/2b63f33a2a4727a437403eceb7a6b4a3
9:00:22
adlai
... although there is also local-package-aliases, and phoe's article does not appear to mention this library: https://quickref.common-lisp.net/local-package-aliases.html
9:02:08
adlai
ACTION repeats that the underlying emphasis should be on the naming convention for the long verbose detailed unambiguous name, and wonders whether there are alternatives to pretending that the domain-name system is sane
9:04:05
adlai
off the top of my head, the packages all use either reversed domain names (e.g. com.symbolics.information.much.too ), or a long library name as prefix and hope the name is uncommon enough to avoid collision.
9:05:05
phoe
because you can use a:alist-plist instead of net.common-lisp.alexandrias.completely.imaginary.package.name:alist-plist
9:05:32
phoe
(I need to make a second version of it that it less of a rant and more of a useful article)
9:17:30
adlai
... wonderful, I learn now that ultralisp includes scalpl, just after its removal from quicklisp
9:18:19
adlai
ACTION does not mind people acting as travis-ci backups; it is almost a compliment, although... not necessarily a good idea.
9:22:58
flip214
phoe: package-local nicknames mean that using INTERN at runtime (even indirectly, eg. when parsing JSON, YAML, etc.!) needs to take *PACKAGE* into account, right?
9:31:48
adlai
ACTION is amazed that phoe has the patience to answer so many of the reddit comments on the article!
9:48:43
adlai
some of the behavior standardized as undefined in clhs 2.3.5 could be useful for concisely naming common mathematical objects according to small integers
9:48:47
specbot
Valid Patterns for Tokens: http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Body/02_ce.htm
9:50:21
adlai
ACTION even at one point had a teacher who used that notation for fractions; in this case, the mathematical objects are, e.g., roots of unity as equivalence classes, rather than members of the field of complex numbers
12:40:47
jackdaniel
I don't remember exact nick, but it is derived from his name (available on the github page)
13:11:20
minion
say "perhaps": An error was encountered in lookup: Parse error:URI "https://www.cliki.net/say%20\"perhaps\"?source" contains illegal character #\" at position 28..
13:23:11
adlai
why would anyone get angry at Nix? it is a strict improvement over the predecessor posix distros...
13:24:20
lucasb
Hello. I think something messed the layout of planet.lisp.org, everything is in italics, inside <i></i> tags, after the middle of first post.
13:25:04
adlai
jmercouris: there's a joke here somewhere, about how only Japanese Lisp programmers have faith
13:26:16
adlai
ACTION is not sufficiently versed in Japanese culture to describe the concept precisely, but essentially, the word "face" has a meaning there, beyond the literal one.
13:27:30
adlai
it is probably closer to the idiomatic usage of 'spine', in English, than to nebulous concepts such as prestige and reputation.