Slightly tangential, but I wish some Lisp would make a serious comeback and challenge mainstream languages. For this purpose, libraries are essential. So better tooling would help, and that's why Ultralisp and Quicklisp are interesting.
Clojure is very nice. I have used it for several projects. But sometimes I would prefer not to rely on Java libraries so much, and cleaner stack traces.
Racket may get some critical momentum now, with the whole merge with Chez.
I don't have high hopes for a Common Lisp implementation, as the ecosystem has become too fragmented and stagnant. But I wish I could be surprised here. Shen introduced some great ideas to make a powerful static typing an option in Lisp [1].
All these new exciting programming languages over the past ~5 years or so are quit exciting. I'm starting to believe that in the not so far future we'll look back on that time period between the late 90s up to the mid 2010s as some kind of a dark age for programming, where we kept using those inelegant, inefficient, hacky languages carried by Moore's law and an incredible demand for new software being written in huge quantity extremely fast, quality be damned.
Now that the gold rush starts to cool down there seem to be a lot of very interesting work to take a few steps back and do it right.
I think your dark age and gold rush theory has some truth to it. The whole industry culture and practices changed during that period, but we're starting to see things like people interested in Rust, even though it's not pitched as a faster way to make slicker generic Web sites and phone apps.
I'm also hoping that Racket (which is is like a secret oasis community) will get more attention, and someone will dust off some old Paul Graham writings about startups and Lisp, and some startups (probably ones who're not just doing another cookie-cutter madlibs startup) will decide to use Racket initially. (Disclosure: I have an interest in promoting Racket, because I'd love to help build startups in Racket, and also recruit top programmers with Racket as a carrot.)
As you're looking for co-founders and/or early hires or consultants, definitely post to the `racket-users` email list (currently also a Google Group), which is the most canonical forum for Racket.
And feel encouraged to email me directly. I might be available then myself, and, if I can get some understanding of your needs, I might also know some other good candidates.
What do you think are good learning resources for learning racket for an experienced (functional) programmer? Is there a book that isn’t focused on learning to program?
For an FP person, you might want to instead start with skimming, for half an hour, the R5RS or R7RS Scheme paper, for the base language from which Racket grew (don't worry about the first-class continuations unless you want to). Then go to the Racket Guide or Racket Reference table of contents, to look for things that you might be looking for from your past FP experience, like `match` (though it's maybe not used as much as you're familiar with). Then look into some of the strengths of Racket, like syntax extension and `#lang`. (If you want additional treatment of syntax extension and `#lang`, see things like Hendershott's "Fear of Macros", and Butterick's book.) Also skim the large list of add-on packages, to get a sense of what's there. Eventually read through the Guide and Reference at your leisure.
Oh, you might like another difference between Racket and R5RS Scheme: Racket has changed some basic Scheme types, like pairs/lists, to be immutable by default. And various additional Racket types, like `struct`s, also have both immutable and mutable variants and parts.
Are you experienced in Common Lisp? Racket is multiparadigm too.
As such, many good multiparadigm books will be of great help. E.g. SICP, but also the much less known yet equally fantastic CTM. None are written in Racket, although SICP with Scheme is close, but many concepts can be ported.
There's also excellent Lisp literature like Lisp in Small Pieces or PAIP, that are always worth to consider.
For working through SICP, you can actually use the Racket tools, like the DrRacket IDE. We rigged up a simple `#lang sicp` that emulates the version of MIT Scheme used for SICP problem sets: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/
After working a lot with statically typed languages, I’ve been doing some work recently with a dynamic language, and it feels refreshingly fun...
Granted, I’ve been using elixir and erlang, where the use of pattern matching matching and immutability give you a lot of the benefits that modern static languages have, but I wouldn’t mind a new wave of modern dynamic languages, or at least static ones that feel more dynamic (Carp may fit in that spot).
We had a dark age of too much VM and scripting languages, and only now getting back how computing could have looked like.
For example, given Anders background imagine how .NET would have been if it was fully AOT compiled and the same low level features from Delphi since version 1.0.
Or if C++ Builder wasn't the only surviving example to RAD development with C++, before others started to build on top of LLVM toolchain.
I really wish someone would put together a new standardization of Common Lisp. The language could be much better with a few minor tweaks: for example, (function +) should be a generic function --- that it is isn't is a silly oversight. Compiler macros should have access to type inference information so that they can do a better job: right now, they're purely syntactic and give up lots of optimization potential as a result.
You can shadow + and use your own implementation in your code, falling back to cl:+ when appropriate. Changing the existing language may be difficult, but building a modified language on top of it is possible: see Shen.
The best tooling still survives on Allegro and LispWorks implementations, but without a major backer pushing it down dev throats like the OS vendors do with their SDKs, there is little hope for such uptake.
We are better off hoping for Lisp inspired languages like Julia or Clojure to win wider market adoption.
Maybe what is really missing is having a Lisp for WebAssembly, being advertised as the best implementation available everywhere and such.
I spend most of my time now in Chicken Scheme http://call-cc.org/ and it's very productive, has a ton of libraries ("eggs"), and makes nice, fast native binaries. Scheme's right on the edge of ascetic discipline and productive tooling, where so many languages are much too far either way.
Racket's weird, not quite a Scheme anymore, tons of libraries but they're often hard to use, and the object system infected too much of it. And performance is poor even with Chez underneath, there's just too much stuff on top. It's a better teaching tool with the tutorial sub-languages than a production language.
I can't work in CLISP, it's like scavenging a junkyard for parts where some work, some haven't for 30 years. Some people love that experience.
Strong typing (also in Typed Racket) isn't going to improve anything, but it's good for marketing to enterprise people.
I have a couple projects in QuickLisp, and more than once I've broken them after I pushed incremental or non-working changes to my repo, didn't go back and fix them in time, and QL pulled the broken code.
Developing in branches would solve the problem, but not everybody does that on smaller informal projects.
On the other hand, I've also been annoyed waiting for bug fixes to trickle through to Quicklisp, so it's not an entirely bad idea...
In the contemporary Common Lisp ecosystem, software is distributed via Quicklisp[1], which is a centralized software repository, where, once a month, a new software distribution is created, encompassing the most recent releases of all software included in the dist. This means that changes in software can take up to a month to be reflected in Quicklisp.
Ultralisp is a Quicklisp-compatible distribution, except it's a bleeding-edge one. Each time a piece of software included in it releases a new version/release/commit, a new dist is created, and the modified software is available in Ultralisp within minutes.
Ah. Understood. I solve this problem by forking every Quicklisp repo I use, and telling ASDF to look in my local clones first. This also solves the problem of making it easy to submit a pull request when I fix a bug in a Quicklisp library.
Also -- and this is very important to me -- it means I'm in control of which version of every library I use. I've been burned too many times by Quicklisp "updating" a library that was previously working which doesn't any more. Now I have direct git control over my version coherency and I'm a happy camper.
I have been doing this for a while by following a pattern found here[0]. I typically follow this and copy every asdf package dependency into the working directory of whatever project I'm working on [setting the subdir-search-registry to (list (truename "./asdf-systems/")) and placing the files into a subdirectory of that name] .This way I have the option to make changes in them without affecting anything else on the system depending on the same package. In general this means I use Quicklisp as a (huge) convenience in finding packages when programming interactively in the REPL, but not in deployment. I think this setup is also nice because it is dead simple to drop in copies of asdf packages from the web that aren't found in the Quicklisp library.
It's all manual now but not that hard. Buried in Quicklisp are the locations of all its repos. The reason I haven't automated it is I don't know if there's a Github API for "Please fork this URI into my account if that's not already done." (Plus not every repo is on Github, and not every QL repo is a proper repo.) I haven't bothered to look into automating it because I don't use that many QL libraries, so manual operation is fine for me. Happy to work with you if you want to try to automate the process.
S3 is a protocol with a myriad of compatible providers. I wish the mailer was SMTP instead of an API. I don’t fully understand the issue with Docker; it’s widely accepted for software distribution and has a multitude of alternative runtimes that require very little config modification.
S3 is defacto proprietary protocol subject to AWS whims, such as recent v4 update of signing algorithm.
Docker, while not proprietary, still subject to moving fast and breaking things, which was amply criticised here on HN.
Common Lisp should stay a refuge from all the rug pulling around. While it's true that quicklisp is far from bedrock, adding volatile APIs into the mix won't help.
From my experience, Docker helps quite a bit with CL stuff in many cases. When you use some shared libs via CFFI, things can get fragile quick, start depending on a particular shared library version on the host system etc. So your app, for instance, works fine on Debian jessie, then you have to upgrade your host system to stretch and oops, it broke here and there. You update your quicklisp dist to fix shared lib incompatibility problem and oops again, you need a week to fix stuff that broke (this reflects some problems with CL library management, too), but you need to have your app up and running on the new system yesterday. If you wrap your CL app in a Docker image, you can continue running it on the prev distro version till you fix it to be compatible with the newer one. And that's just one example.
Right, CFFI is another can of worms. It is sometimes questionable whether the time saved by reusing C code isn't lost by debugging and integration issues. For example I ended up avoiding cl-async (a wrapper over a C library) due to these.
In my mind reimplementing in CL is better bet than pulling Docker.
I reimplemented the parts I needed using threads+usockets. There's no fundamental reason it can't be built directly on OS async interfaces, even without threading, instead of C library.
> If you wrap your CL app in a Docker image, you can continue running it on the prev distro version till you fix it to be compatible with the newer one. And that's just one example.
That is perfect match for guix channels too.
What I do is maintain a repository of package definitions (that possibly inherit from guix master package definitions) and only change a few hashes here and there when I need.
Clojure is very nice. I have used it for several projects. But sometimes I would prefer not to rely on Java libraries so much, and cleaner stack traces.
Racket may get some critical momentum now, with the whole merge with Chez.
I don't have high hopes for a Common Lisp implementation, as the ecosystem has become too fragmented and stagnant. But I wish I could be surprised here. Shen introduced some great ideas to make a powerful static typing an option in Lisp [1].
[1] http://www.shenlanguage.org/