Lisp and Haskell

Published on October 23, 2015, last updated November 23, 2019

Lisp and Haskell are arguably some of the more peculiar languages out there. It is always interesting to compare languages, so let me entertain you with a story how I finally decided which of them is better.

When I first found out about Common Lisp it took my breath away. Seriously, Lisp has consistent syntax, good design, and unique metaprogramming capabilities. After Common Lisp, I learned a few other languages, some of them out of necessity, others because of curiosity: Python, JavaScript, Prolog, Clojure, and Haskell. I also was doing C and C++ in the past, but I don’t touch them now. Until recently I considered Common Lisp the best language I know, and probably the most powerful language in existence.

The fact is, I know what Common Lisp is and what it can do, but the days when I actually hacked Lisp (more or less) regularly are long gone, and I’m mainly doing Haskell these days.

Goodbye, Lisp

Today I actually have had a chance to compare my productivity with Common Lisp and Haskell. I decided to spend a few hours on my open source projects. First, I refactored Megaparsec, and that was nice and easy, but I didn’t notice this because I’m already used to the level of efficiency Haskell gives me.

Next, a user of one of my Common Lisp libraries opened an issue asking to improve one thing a bit. I estimated the required work in 15 minutes of time and started Common Lisp hacking for the first time in a couple of months.

It took about 1 hour to write about 20 lines of trivial code. Of course one might say that I just forgot the details. Yet, from my point of view the real reasons are:

Common Lisp is dynamically typed and the compiler cannot help you when you write your code. (Well, it can help you a bit, making sure that your code is syntactically correct and all your declared variables are used for something.)

Common Lisp mixes functional code with code that has side effects. To write idiomatic Common Lisp, you usually have to mix functional code with not-so-functional approaches. See how this works below.

Common Lisp’s standard library (the functions that are available to you as part of the ANSI Common Lisp standard) is quite poor by modern standards. A lot of useful functions are missing. There are libraries, but I’ll get to them.

It’s essential for that library I was working on to have minimal dependencies, so I came up with this function in bare Common Lisp to add padding to every line of text except for the first line:

( defun add-text-padding (str &key padding newline) "Add padding to text STR. Every line except for the first one, will be prefixed with PADDING spaces. If NEWLINE is non-NIL, newline character will be prepended to the text making it start on the next line with padding applied to every single line." ( let ((str ( if newline ( concatenate 'string ( string #\N ewline) str) str))) ( with-output-to-string (s) ( map 'string ( lambda (x) ( princ x s) ( when ( char= x #\N ewline) ( dotimes (i padding) ( princ #\S pace s)))) str))))

In case you don’t speak Common Lisp, let me highlight some parts of the code:

concatenate needs to know the type of its output, so we pass it a symbol specifying type of desired result as the first argument.

(string #\Newline) constructs a line containing a single newline character. There is no syntax in Common Lisp to write something like "

" . The alternative approach would be (format nil "~%") . There is no syntax for all other special characters if you want to put them into string. To be fair, you have multi-line string literals without funny escaping instead, which is vital for doc-strings and the like.

(map 'string …) is used to loop through characters in a string. Note that here we use map function as a helper for a rather imperative procedure—printing results to new string using a temporarily created stream s (with the help of with-output-to-string ). But that’s idiomatic in Common Lisp.

When I ran this in the REPL, I got the following:

; SLIME 2015-10-18 CL-USER> (asdf:load-system :unix-opts) T CL-USER> ( in-package :unix-opts) #<PACKAGE "UNIX-OPTS" > OPTS> ( defvar *foo* ( format nil "first line~%second line~%third line" )) *FOO* OPTS> *foo* "first line second line third line" ; compiling (DEFUN ADD-TEXT-PADDING ...) OPTS> (add-text-padding *foo* :padding 10 ) ; Evaluation aborted on #<TYPE-ERROR expected-type: CHARACTER datum: NIL>.

The debugger popped up and told me in plain English:

The value NIL is not of type CHARACTER.

It is difficult to argue with, nil is definitely not a character. But why the heck do I get this? Can you tell? Please try as hard as you can! (The answer is at the end of the blog post.)

I decided that I won’t hack Common Lisp anymore. That’s great and expressive language, but I want to write in something I’m efficient with.

Productivity of Haskell programmer

I use Emacs for almost everything that is related to text. One package I love in particular is Flycheck. When I edit Haskell source code, Flycheck is running GHC with -Wall flag and HLint in the background and displays warnings and errors interactively underlining my source code. This is a convenient feature for any language, but only Haskell with its type system takes this sort of tool to its limits.

In fact, this non-stop interactive conversation with compiler is the most efficient programming workflow I’ve ever used. Combined with the fact that if your code compiles, it probably works, Haskell must be the most efficient (with respect to human resources) programming language in existence just because of the static type system that works as a powerful ally for the programmer. Of course, bugs can live in Haskell code too, but I’m not saying we should abandon writing tests.

Problems of Common Lisp

Speaking of tests, recently I discovered that Zach Beane AKA Xach, an über-level Common Lisp hacker doesn’t usually write tests. FYI, he is the author of Quicklisp, that is something like (but not quite) Cabal or Stack. Quicklisp is de-facto the only widely used library manager in Common Lisp world, and so it’s written in Common Lisp and doesn’t have any tests. It is a wonder for me how it works. Usually when a project is big enough I start to have doubts whether all parts of it still work after some changes, so I cannot imagine you can do a thing like Quicklisp without tests and be confident about the result.

But you know what, Lisp, and its most advanced dialect (IMO), Common Lisp is really cool. If you don’t believe me, you can read Paul Graham at any time. The author can tell you what a great language Common Lisp is on many-many pages. I don’t remember where I read this, but he has something like “There is the problem of lacking libraries, but on a big enough project benefits of the language itself outweigh the lack of libraries.”

Well, take any high-level language like Python, which have all the nice libraries, and for project of any size it will be better than Common Lisp. Macros are missing, but you can live without macros after all.

Common Lisp doesn’t have enough high-quality, actively maintained libraries. The fact is, there are some pearls like caveman or stumpwm, but most libraries don’t look good enough. Sometimes you start thinking that if you want to end up with a great project you’ll need to write your own libraries (which you’ll probably do, like many people before you, not that it has improved the situation though).

Another problem is that some widely-used Common Lisp libraries have no documentation at all. If you’re to understand how to use them, read the source code. I can name a couple of them, but I don’t want to do so, because I don’t think it’s polite. I’ve opened an issue on GitHub of one quite popular library, asking the maintainer to write documentation. After 6 months it’s still not written (strange, right?). In my opinion, this is not a serious approach to maintaining your code.

When I was interested in Common Lisp, I had an idea of a pet project to help me remember all sorts of French words and verbs in particular. Of course I wanted to do the whole thing decently, even though it’s console app, it should have decent interface and work smoothly in general. I succeeded, but I had to do a lot more than I would need to do if I wrote it in, say Python. This is how (in retrospect I understand) less powerful Python would be better fit for this (or almost any) project.

The curse of dynamic languages

There is a blog post called Dynamic Languages are Static Languages. In short, the author makes the point that dynamic langauges are static languages but with one huge type including all possible values. Here is a paragraph I find important:

And this is precisely what is wrong with dynamically typed languages: rather than affording the freedom to ignore types, they instead impose the bondage of restricting attention to a single type! Every single value has to be a value of that type, you have no choice! Even if in a particular situation we are absolutely certain that a particular value is, say, an integer, we have no choice but to regard it as a value of the “one true type” that is classified, not typed, as an integer. Conceptually, this is just rubbish, but it has serious, tangible penalties. For one, you are depriving yourself of the ability to state and enforce the invariant that the value at a particular program point must be an integer. For another, you are imposing a serious bit of run-time overhead to represent the class itself (a tag of some sort) and to check and remove and apply the class tag on the value each time it is used.

The lack of the power to express meaning of your program on type level is another downside of Lisp. (You can add types in Common Lisp too, but that’s used solely for optimization. Common Lisp can be almost as fast as C, by the way.) Unfortunately most statically typed languages don’t have powerful enough type system that would work as your ally, not enemy that exists only to tell you that your code won’t compile. Once you have strong and flexible type system, it is very addictive.

Of course programming is (mostly) not math. There are things that “conceptually just rubbish” for some, but then they suddenly give you something like Lisp macros from practical point of view. What I can say for sure is that I cannot be sure about my code in dynamic languages anymore.

A better Lisp?

Now, it’s tempting to think that Lisp can be somehow enhanced with strong static typing. Racket has statically typed dialect. The question is whether its type system is advanced enough? I mean, does it allow to express non-trivial invariants? How does it play with macros, etc? I don’t know, contact me if you used both Racket and Haskell and you can make a comparison.

The selling features of Lisp, such as reprogramming on the fly and Lisp macros are tightly connected to the dynamic nature of the language. Lisp is like a living organism, it’s full of reflection and there is no difference between compile and run time. That’s why you can process Lisp code with Lisp dynamically. There is Template Haskell for example, which allows you to do metaprogramming and it’s type-safe, but this is static metaprogramming, which is not quite the same.

I think it is difficult to have entire Lisp statically typed. From the very basic things like cons cells it’s all dynamic. One thing is clear, Lisp with strong and powerful static typing system can be very different from what our familiar Lisps are.

Hackish vs protecting languages

I’ve come to the idea that there are two camps of programming languages:

Hacking languages where everything is possible and you can do whatever you want (potentially bad things).

Languages that try to protect you from your own mistakes.

When I was younger I liked hacking languages. C is definitely a hacking language. If you want an example of protecting language of roughly the same level, that’s Pascal.

In Russia, Pascal is especially popular as the first language you’re taught in school, institute, or university. I hated Pascal. I learned C on my own because it seemed more hardcore and real. Then I learned C++ to do my assignments (usually we were permitted to write in anything, I abused this when I started to do my assignments in Common Lisp, a language that my examiners could not read at all).

Now I appreciate the protecting languages, maybe because I know that I’ll definitely make mistakes and I want something to catch them. Haskell has changed me as a programmer. Now I think there is something good (apart from the strings that know their length) in Pascal, at least I don’t hate it anymore.

Fix for that code snippet

If you’re still curious, map tries to assemble the specified (as its first argument) data-type ( string in my case) using values returned by its second argument when called with an element from sequence supplied as third argument. Since the lambda has dotimes as the last form in its body, the whole function always returns nil . nil is not a character and we cannot build a string from nil s.

So the fix is to pass nil as the first argument of map indicating that we just want to return nil without building any string.

I put there string thinking about the string I wanted to traverse. Stupid mistake? Maybe so, I’m just a human. For me, the cause of the problem was not obvious until I found out what’s going on, and that took a while. Think about Haskell where this problem would have no place to hide in.

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