libera/#commonlisp - IRC Chatlog
Search
13:52:14
untakenstupidnic
everyone who uses lisp is so enthusiastic about it, some say SBCL's generated code can run faster than C. but if there was such a great language from ancient times and was so mainstream, how did C++ survive?
13:54:08
untakenstupidnic
and why is it so rarely used and unlike C# and java, i don't see efforts to rewrite the whole world in it?
14:04:19
phoe
untakenstupidnic: one such thing is http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
14:06:07
phoe
also opinion-based discussions from google, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153812 and https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Lisp-not-as-popular-as-Python and https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60012/why-isnt-lisp-more-widespread
14:06:26
Shinmera
it's not about lisp, it's just a fundamental property that good things don't become dominant just because they're good, and vice versa that dominant things are not necessarily good.
14:06:27
beach
untakenstupidnic: You make an assumption that just isn't true, namely that people are rational and that they would prefer things just because they are good. If you look around, you will see that this is not the case.
14:07:18
phoe
also because DARPA stopped funding AI work in the 80s and instead started paying for C++ projects much more
14:09:28
phoe
also note that your question can be flipped over; if C++ is so popular and used by the some of the largest softwaremaking players in the world, how did $LANGUAGE_NAME survive
14:12:09
phoe
this is a surprisingly non-trivial question with complex and mostly incomplete answers that differ per every language you might insert in there
14:31:50
untakenstupidnic
phoe: thanks! one link was enough. also the C++ thing can be explained because of excessive bloat and that some people care for maintainablity. phoe: beach: Shinmera: but people say it was dominant and is the ultimate language, and people normally don't break the status que for making things worse.
14:32:56
untakenstupidnic
thanks for answering and if a question gets asked every day, ##C solves that with bots.
14:38:55
Shinmera
If a function dispatches based on type but nobody is around to see it, is it actually generic?
14:39:36
Shinmera
phoe: I feel like a canned bot answer won't really satisfy people that are genuinely looking for the answer, and won't stop people who're just trolling.
14:40:42
beach
I agree with Shinmera. I think we should take on the question each time, adapted to the exact question of course. It doesn't happen that often, and we get to show off our friendliness if the troll is not too bad.
14:42:20
phoe
Shinmera: no, why? one can ask minion about "popularity" to not need to google for these links again and again
14:43:51
minion
phoe: look at popularity: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html and http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153812 and https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Lisp-not-as-popular-as-Python and https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60012/why-isnt-lisp-more-widespread
14:47:15
phoe
someone will if the libraries are used; do you plan on disappearing any time in the near future?
14:48:08
Shinmera
And even if I don't plan to it would be nice if I didn't have to maintain everything while I'm still around. That's a lot to ask for though, I know.
14:48:37
phoe
correct, maintenance is a burden in general, especially maintenance that no one pays you for
14:49:12
jebes
i'm currently unemployed (and probably for the forseeable future) and need some resume boosters, i'd love to help out where I can
14:49:59
Shinmera
Not sure lisp would boost that resume much, but maybe you can pawn it off as "open source work"
14:50:46
jebes
shinmera: the only jobs here are enterprise jobs and there's barely developers to begin with. I don't need much of a resume to get a job lmao
14:50:52
phoe
sure thing you can, working with other people on alive FOSS projects is a useful skill on its own regardless of the languages and technology used
14:55:37
phoe
Shinmera: I think the current README should have links to some of the videos you posted of it in action
14:56:56
Shinmera
phoe: Fair point. They're here for now. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkDl6Irujx9Mh3BWdBmt4JtIrwYgihTWp
14:57:26
Shinmera
and doing this got me where I needed to be faster than if I needed to figure out how to make a usable GL backend with CLIM.
15:00:11
Shinmera
Alloy has a GL backend, and you can use it for that, yes. https://twitter.com/Shinmera/status/1203361882113036288
15:00:25
pfdietz
Unmaintained libraries are more useful if they're matured to a state where they need little or no maintenance.
15:01:15
pfdietz
Not referring to anything you have done in that comment, but I see libraries up on github from various sources that aren't fully baked.
15:01:33
Xach
pfdietz: the prove incident is interesting to me because prove is considered obsolete, but is still widely used, and although it didn't change, one of its active prerequisites did.
15:01:34
Shinmera
pfdietz: True enough. Sadly with most of my stuff I don't know if people are just not using them, or there's no bugs, or they just don't report them and give up.
15:02:13
pfdietz
I have been spending a little time recently trying to harden some public projects there.
15:02:26
Xach
Shinmera: i've found out about patches to my projects in weird indirect ways, when nobody bothered to tell me about them.
15:03:17
Xach
jebes: a prerequisite of prove changed and prove stopped building. prove is not maintained but is still used by a dozen+ projects.
15:03:36
Ampws
I wonder ... if common lisp is suitable for the study of computational neuroscience...It seems that MATLAB is always used in this subject...
15:03:45
Xach
prove itself kept building but a prerequisite introduced a new dependency that made other stuff break in certain circumstances.
15:04:07
pfdietz
Ampws: that would likely come down to availability of the necessary libraries and interfacing to other tools.
15:05:09
pfdietz
Xach: the issue was use of an unexported symbol, right? Curation for that in widely used systems would be useful.
15:05:37
jebes
you're welcome. Back in my day we had to write everything in assembly to run forth to run psuedo-lisp to control telescopes
15:05:46
Xach
pfdietz: oh yeah, that was part of it, and then there was another part that was another problem.
15:10:32
jebes
Ampws: out of curiousity what tech stacks do computational neuroscience use in matlab?
15:15:16
jebes
i do want to write a gpgpu system in lisp, unless anyone knows of one already in existence
15:23:18
phoe
nirved: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/3r8pew/opencl_binding_for_common_lisp/ lists some
15:29:58
Shinmera
jebes: I'm the guy that writes everything himself and yes it is a bad idea if you want to be done in a timely fashion.
15:32:41
Xach
Shinmera: some article or blog about some lisp experience that mentions patching something in passing
15:54:02
Shinmera
jebes: If you're serious about helping out, feel free to stop by #shirakumo, the primary channel for project discussion around what I do.
17:02:07
neuro_sys
Why does 2.el behave differently than 1.el in terms of scope rules? https://gist.github.com/neuro-sys/b5ca549674f1968f1a61da9f07b38c3f (Although note, this is Elisp, was hoping people here are knowledgable about it too).
18:03:58
Shinmera
I suppose I'll instead try to automate the webpage rebuild with github's action stuff.
18:10:25
Shinmera
so, in theory, all I need to be able to do is to run sbcl to build that index, and then push the new index live.
19:08:43
galdor
is there an equivalent to STRING= for vectors ? i.e. something with :START, :END, :KEY, and :TEST
19:14:01
galdor
SEARCH works but MISMATCH will stop at the first element which fails the comparison so it's better
19:14:51
Shinmera
well search would also abort early since they couldn't match anyway due to the two sub regions not being long enough anymore for a match anyway.
19:26:48
phoe
I remember that I learned about its existence then forgot about it again like three times now
19:28:49
BirthdayboiJosh
I was just skimming over ANSI Common Lisp and saw mismatch, I didn't know it existed, and then this conversation happened 2 minutes after
19:29:10
travv0
it's pretty embarrassing how often i forget and am reminded of even commonly used functions
19:32:39
pfdietz
I was chagrined when I discovered an entire symbol I had overlooked when writing the ansi-tests: STANDARD
19:36:04
pfdietz
I mean, a user *could*. And if evaluated as a special in unsafe code, perhaps it gives some garbage that's not nil?
19:37:30
pfdietz
But simply using it as a special without a declaration... not conforming, but implementations will let you do that, often.