[chubot]

If you're using JavaScript, I think that's actually an advantage because your closures can return multiple named methods (in a JS dictionary). To me, closures in Lisp seem a bit impoverished since it's awkward to return more than one method. (Another problem is that I don't like reifying random local variables as program state. State is important; it should be both minimized and made explicit. Classes make it explicit.)

Classes with one method are useful, but so are classes with multiple methods.

I just stumbled across this post again, and HIGHLY agree with it. Yegge is basically outlining why JavaScript is a better language than Emacs Lisp. I had the same experience with hacking on femtolisp and trying to write my shell in it.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...

OCaml and Lisp both have problems with polymorphic print. There were some recent posts on HN about the expression problem, and the duality between FP and OOP, which I liked. But I have to say that print should be polymorphic, full stop. And if your functional language has problems with that, that's the language's problem and not my problem :)

Related:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497801/closures-are-poor...

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent

[Roboprog]

Back at CSU in the 80s, the Lisp exposure we had was so so. We learned about pure functions and a tiny bit about higher order functions, but that's about it. Nothing much about closures explicitly.

It's funny that one of the other commenters mentioned Smalltalk and blocks. Version 5 of the "Clipper" language I was using at work, which came out around 1990, added (borrowed, stole) blocks to an "XBase" style language. I didn't quite know what to do with them, so I used them to simulate virtual method tables in a non-OOP language :-)

It wasn't until I started tinkering with Ruby around 2006 or so that all the block / closure / lambda stuff REALLY sunk in ("Hmm. I could have been doing this - subroutines as closures, and not just "blank" call-backs - in all the Perl 5 code I've written the last 8 years"), some 20 years or so after I was in college. They did a good job of brainwashing proto-OOP into us back in the mid 80s.

Never used any Lisp macros, but "eval" and dynamic languages sure help shorten many tasks vs static types bondage and discipline. There's another Yegge essay on that sort of thing ("code compression"). The PC "4GL" type languages I used at work in the 80s were dynamic, with runtime types, and quite productive for the jobs they were designed for (pre MS-Windows...). I'm tired of the static type authoritarians punishing us all for the sins of C/C++. (I need to stop before I go into another rant)

[lispm]

In Common Lisp it is easy to return multiple closures.

Emacs Lisp now has lexical closures, too.

Common Lisp has no problems with 'polymorphic print'.

[chubot]

Fair enough, but the appeal of Lisp to me is that it's a small axiomatic core, something that not only fits in your head, but the whole implementation fits in your head too. I wanted to use it to bootstrap languages, with no dependencies.

But it turns out that this axiomatic core is too impoverished for a lot of programming. You DO need something like Common Lisp on top. And I'm not really willing to open that can of worms, both for this specific project, and in general.

I would liken it to the language "Factor", which I've also experimented with... you took a specific and elegant paradigm, and tried to extend it to all paradigms, and ended up with a mess. A square peg in a round hole. Factor is basically Forth with OOP and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The other problem I pointed out is that the first problem you hit when writing a language is writing a lexer. I don't see anything that Lisp offers you in that respect. I looked at how Julia does it:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/src/julia-par...

Julia is actually bootstrapped in femtolisp. If you look at the lexer, it just looks like C code written with Scheme syntax. There's nothing helpful about this. It doesn't help you manage state. I might as well just write C.

(And actually I chose the code generator re2c, which is BETTER than C.)

[lispm]

> whole implementation fits in your head too

Of the axiomatic core. But not of any programming language.

> But it turns out that this axiomatic core is too impoverished for a lot of programming.

It's not even a programming language. It's just an axiomatic core. If you try to use it for programming you must be doing something wrong.

> is writing a lexer. I don't see anything that Lisp offers you in that respect.

Lisp is a language family, not language implementation with a library, which happens to include a lexer library.

If you mean Common Lisp as a programming language with implementations, there are portable lexers.

http://www.cliki.net/LEXER

https://github.com/drewc/smug

https://github.com/lispbuilder/lispbuilder

Writing your own lexer in Lisp shouldn't be too hard. People have written applications in Lisp which includes lexer functionality.

[chubot]

I don't think your opinion about the axiomatic core matches that of all, or even most, Lisp programmers.

And I'm not saying it's not possible to write lexers in Scheme or Common Lisp. I'm saying that there's no real benefit to doing so over C or even Python. You're using the exact same algorithms and just transliterating it into a different language with more awkward syntax for that problem. The code isn't any shorter.

Related to the other commenter as well, the production quality Julia parser in Lisp doesn't use parser combinators. It uses recursive descent. It's C code written in Lisp syntax.

[lispm]

> I don't think your opinion about the axiomatic core matches that of all, or even most, Lisp programmers.

I have never seen anyone developing software with the 'axiomatic core'. But I see Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, etc. developers.

> And I'm not saying it's not possible to write lexers in Scheme or Common Lisp. I'm saying that there's no real benefit to doing so over C or even Python.

Depends on what level you program. With Lisp it is possible to develop a compact syntax, which expresses domain-level concepts, very easily. Interactive development is many times more convenient than in C.

> You're using the exact same algorithms and just transliterating it into a different language with more awkward syntax for that problem. The code isn't any shorter.

I have a surprise for you: it's perfectly legal to write imperative code in Lisp. Lisp is at its heart a multi-paradigm language with the option to add many other paradigms.

With Python you develop mostly object-oriented and in C it's mostly imperative. With something like Common Lisp you can do what you want.