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4:27:43
lukego
SLIME really needs a way to give you a hint when the long computation you're waiting for has stopped because SBCL ran out of heap space and discretely printed a nasty warning in *inferior-lisp* before waiting with the socket open at the ldb> prompt
5:30:13
beach
lukego: SLIME is good, but it is not great, and some of the limitations are probably due to intrinsic problems with the technique being used.
6:17:38
lukego
beach: True. But that sounds a bit like a fortune-cooking comment that could apply to any project :)
6:19:29
lukego
and in this case I'm not sure that it would be advantageous to have the tooling running inside that Lisp image that has run out of heap space (or e.g. heap corrupted) and landed at the LDB prompt. The fact that it's partitioned into a separate subprocess is kind of handy because I'm restarting the Lisp process multiple times per day but never losing my editor state, since my Emacs is a lot more stable than my Common Lisp :)
6:20:47
lukego
is the long term vision for mcclim ecosystem to run all of the Lisp code together in the same image? Or to partition it into multiple images e.g. the way HEMLOCK had REMOTE stuff to manage an "inferior" lisp process way back when?
6:25:09
lukego
This is btw the main topic on my mind this morning: where should the inter-process/inter-language boundaries in my system be? which parts are best integrated, which best separated, and which doesn't it matter? Interesting in the context of e.g. SMT solvers, machine learning toolkits, data visualization, etc, where the benefits of integration need to outweigh a *lot* of extra work reinventing stuff that's available separately
6:26:33
beach
Right, our Common Lisp implementations are not stable enough, or safe enough, to handle an IDE in the same image.
6:27:08
beach
But it seems like the wrong approach to take for granted that our Common Lisp implementations are not great, and work around it, rather than fixing the implementations.
6:29:16
beach
I don't think that there is an agreed-upon vision for McCLIM. I know what I want, and I believe scymtym shares this vision. I also know that Shinmera (for example) does not share it. He once said something like "I will *never* use an editor that runs in the same image as my Common Lisp system".
6:30:01
lukego
My mental model of Lisp is also "I should restart the image at least once per day or week for the sake of hygeine" but I don't want ot restart my editor so often
6:31:13
hayley
My mental model of Lisp is that, would someone implement htop in CLOSOS for some reason, the machine should always have the exclamation mark that htop adds as a suffix to long uptimes.
6:31:16
beach
That is a weird model, but also probably due to restrictions of our Common Lisp implementations. Just as I don't restart my operating system even once a month, I think I shouldn't be required to restart my Common Lisp system. But the way things currently are, I pretty much have to.
6:33:16
beach
lukego: Here is how I see it. A Common Lisp implementation should have multiple first-class global environments, and instead of restarting your entire system, you might be required to trash the current first-class global environment if you (say) delete an essential function, and create a new one.
6:47:21
lukego
I know. I see lots of benefits to the fully integrated approach, and lots of benefits to the full separated approach. I'm not sure if your model is a best-of or worst-of both worlds approach?
6:48:15
beach
Right, it's hard to tell. But I know of only one way to figure it out, namely to try it and see.
6:49:02
lukego
The expected reward isn't high enough for me, but that's a very uncertain quantity of course.
6:50:48
beach
This vision I have has resulted in 2 papers per year for 8 years, and I can't think of a better line of research than that.
6:57:59
lukego
but this topic is at the top of my mind right now. mapping out my own personal computing ecosystem in terms of lisp, C, R, Julia, python, etc. what to use for which tasks, and how to make them interact? I spend a lot of time bothering about this stuff -- and that's a very real cost that you don't have when you focus on a pure Lisp stack.
7:01:37
lukego
in the machine learning landscape it seems to me like some things benefit hugely from tight integration, e.g. quickly iterating gradient descent optimization over automatically-differentiated functions written directly in the application's language e.g. accessing internal data structures to guide the process. Julia has this via Flux.jl and Zygote.jl and people rave about it.
7:02:45
lukego
I was tempted to write my application in Julia to access that stuff but current feeling is that reinventing it in Lisp would be less work than (inevitably) reinventing lots of Lisp-isms that I would miss in Julia e.g. Emacs integrations.
7:04:31
lukego
On the other hand it seems like MCMC and neural network kind of stuff doesn't necessarily have much advantage of doing inside the application. they are like extremely special-case virtual machines that you configure and run but don't really do any interesting application-specific things inside (from what I can see.) a bit like SMT solving. Maybe that stuff should just get shelled out to an off-the-shelf solver in C++/Python/ec.
7:06:26
lukego
beach: btw I respect the work that you are doing and I recognize the dream, having had the same one a long time ago, but I'm just in a different corner of this gigantic expanding computing universe these days. I regret having these nay-saying interactions with you, but it seems rooted in your value judgements of e.g. Emacs based on your own subjective criteria, so I'm not sure how to refrain from reacting :)
7:15:17
pjb
In any case, eventually this should lead to the same user experience: if you botch an environment in your CL image, you will still kill it and start a new envionment…
7:15:26
lukego
(Maybe I should try harder to avoid naysaying. SICL does look like the foundation for future generations of Lispers from where I sit and that's hugely important. I'm just a bit more myopic and not often seeing much beyond a ~ 5 year time horizon.)
7:35:20
beach
lukego: You can be as much of a naysayer as you like. Like water off a duck's back to me.
7:36:05
beach
lukego: And I am not trying to convince you. What I write is for the benefit of all #commonlisp participants. Otherwise, I would do it in a private exchange with you.
7:40:21
lukego
that's the thing, I don't like being a naysayer. I suppose that I feel baited. I'll take a break on that note :)
10:21:07
greyrat
Lukego: I am migrating my Julia dev env from vscode to emacs, and I am quited pleased with eglot (whose non-REPL experience seems as good as vscode, or better for me since I can customize a lot of stuff in elisp) and Revise.jl (so that I can run a standalone REPL that automatically gets updated when I save my edits, i.e., an alternative to SLIME). (Not to mention, copy-pasting using evil text objects for 'cells' between '##' lines helps
10:21:08
greyrat
a lot with using a non-nitegrated REPL.) (jupyter-emacs and org-babel also used to work somewhat well, but recently have broken on my new emacs 28.)
10:21:58
greyrat
What I still haven't found is how to launch a graphical REPL without firing up the whole vscode Electron machinary, as the TUI REPL isn't as nice for working with plots and images.
10:29:27
greyrat
lukego: another thing I am working on, is to create a general purpose HTTP API using Jupyter kernels that can eval code in any languages. So for example, I'll load up Julia kernels with the needed dependencies, and then I can easily "shell out" to them in any language. This seems the easiest way to interop between different languages that sometimes have expensive startup costs, to me. What are your thoughts? (I currently have a
10:29:27
greyrat
self-implemented (not using Jupyter) HTTP API for zsh, and it has been perhaps the single most useful thing I have ever built. Using that, I can easily execute zsh code in, e.g., elisp, with a syntax as nice as `(z custom-zsh-function (elisp-functions-are-evaled-and-their-results-quoted) (identity some-elisp-var) automatically-quoted-string)`: `(z mkdir -p (identity my-path))` . I currently use some zsh helpers for running pipes (or
10:29:28
greyrat
directly use `(z eval 'produce | consume')`, but it's just a matter of doing the work to support `(z produce | consumer)` directly.
10:31:44
greyrat
(I have a lot of zsh code, so zsh takes ~6 seconds to boot up on my machine, which is my I don't just use `zsh -c '...'`. The same problem applies to Julia; Python starts up fast enough that I have not needed a server for it yet.)