by caned on 6/23/25, 8:00 PM with 32 comments
by fifticon on 6/27/25, 3:40 PM
background - I am a computer science major with 30+ years experience. I did do a mandatory class of 'implement your own lisp' many eons ago. It just never really 'clicked' for me. I do, by accident, assimilation and lazyness,employ FP style designs in my software. And I guess fp techniques gradually rub off on me from e.g. javascript, lambdas,closures, and map-filter-reduce. in particular, lambdas are useful to me. But I am one of the guys who continue to read the "let me tell you what monads really are", and every time I fall off the bicycle. So, well, I appreciated this 'Xfor 5year olds" :-)
by dawnofdusk on 6/27/25, 6:47 PM
I love Lisp. The last few paragraphs are a pretty good description. It's nice to have a very flexible set of tools, instead of being forced to conform to object-oriented design or whatever paradigm. IMO the only legitimate reason in sticking steadfast to a design paradigm is for performance reasons, but of course this can only really justify array programming/imperative programming. But at the point where you want some flexible abstractions, it's nice to have the power to do introspection, delayed evaluation, and so on. Disclaimer: my background is physics/math, so function abstractions are much more intuitive to me than objects, or whatever other structures are taught to CS students.
by lproven on 6/27/25, 12:01 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851992
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44359454
No comments on any of them.
It sounded of interest to me, but I read it and closed the tab within a page or so as it wandered off into tech arcana. Shame. There may be an interesting idea in here but it's phrased in terms I think few will be able to follow and understand.
I did not finish it but I saw no mention of the lambda calculus or of currying, both of which -- from my very meagre understanding -- seem directly relevant to what I understood to be the core point, which seems to be about anonymous functions.
by int_19h on 6/27/25, 10:07 PM
R takes it up a notch though by making all syntactic constructs boil down to a function call. Function definitions are themselves calls, for example, and so are assignments and even curly braces.
by deterministic on 6/30/25, 5:42 AM
If the purpose is to try and convince non-Lispers to use Lisp, a more convincing argument (for me at least) would be to demonstrate modern commercial software written faster and more bug free in Lisp.
For example: "Here is a modern biz web application written in Lisp" showing step by step how Lisp makes the development process faster and less buggy than implementing the same application using (say) Typescript/C++.
Notes: I use custom code generators to generate more than 90% of the Typescript/C++ code needed to implement biz applications. Leaving only the core biz logic. So macros for code generation doesn't really give me anything I don't have already. And using macros for defining my own DSL's within the language would just makes the code unreadable for other developers. So it is not a feature I actually want.
by timewizard on 6/27/25, 6:04 PM
typedef int fn_t(int, int);
int iff(bool cond, fn_t a, fn_t b) {
if (cond)
return(a());
else
return(b());
}