From: (Anonymous)

2009-07-01 02:37 pm (UTC)

check out forth check out forth From: (Anonymous)

2009-07-01 04:12 pm (UTC)

Re: check out forth There is quite a bit of similarity (in principle) between LISP and other (mostly monadic) languages.



FORTH is an amazing language, but there's something about it which prevented its adoption. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It allows nearly free-form syntax, the solving of problems by constructing a solution vocabulary, interactivity second to none and can be implemented in a small amount of assembler code.



On the other hand, the semantics of using a stack as your primary data structure can become quite strange and easily gets out of hand. I know there are ways around it, but...



List (or more generally treap/hash) based languages provide a powerful and universal data structure that encourages general tool development, much as the author explains. There are parallels with unix pipe scripting as well.



Personally I like to use one powerful, general-purpose compiled language (currently D), write short utilities with a great scripting language (Python or Lua - both list/treap based) and play with a promising new language.



My favorite new language to learn is Haskell. It's very closely related to Scheme, though the syntax is easier on the eye. Its interactive, compiles to highly efficient machine language and it natively supports multi-core, multi-threading expressions / algorithms.



Quicksort can be expressed elegantly in a short, single, understandable line of code. (!!)



I have an neural net / AI project which I think would be wonderfully suited to it.



Check them all out.



FORTH: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

Python: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/html/

Lua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

Haskell: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction



eris

From: (Anonymous)

2009-07-01 06:01 pm (UTC)

Re: check out forth There are also other stack based languages which are purer or more modern replacements for good old Forth. Look at Factor, Cat and Joy. From: kreelman

2009-07-01 11:25 pm (UTC)

Re: check out forth Cool, thanks guys for the links and the ideas.

I remember someone explaining forth to me when I was about 13. I don't think I've heard of it much since then. So it probably passes one of the tests for a lost jewel of a language.

Always interesting to look at new stuff.





David From: laikasrocket

2009-07-02 07:08 am (UTC)

Re: check out forth



http://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/picoLisp-Arc-before-Arc.html

http://www.software-lab.de/down.html For an interesting little FORTH inspired LISP, check out PicoLisp (it also comes with a PROLOG dialect built in): From: kragen

2009-07-02 01:08 am (UTC)

I had the same experience; the CIO in my case was Jay Lark, and he wasn't a CIO quite yet. (And I had read Wilensky's Lispcraft years before, which opened my eyes quite a bit, too, but it was really SICP that changed my outlook. I wrote an essay about my evolution as a programmer which you can find if you are interested.)



Who was the CIO in your case?



My current preferred Lisp-equivalents are Python and JavaScript. They are quite slow, and I do use Common Lisp sometimes. From: kreelman

2009-07-09 06:41 am (UTC)

Hi Kragen,

The fellow I met was James Thorpe. He used to be a manager at Borland Australia and then became a CIO somewhere else after that.



Not wanting to be contrarian/annoying, but I don't know if I'd call Python lisp-like. There are some similarities, but I think the code is data thing is not there in Python. Are functions first class objects in Python (I've not looked into it)?



Must finish SICP. Must finish SICP. Must finish SICP. Must finish SICP....

From: kragen

2009-07-09 08:50 am (UTC)

Not wanting to be contrarian/annoying, but I don't know if I'd call Python lisp-like. Well, you're entitled to your opinion, of course, but you should read Norvig's before you make up your mind completely. Don't worry about being annoying. There are some similarities, but I think the code is data thing is not there in Python. No, it's not, except in the trivial senses that you can eval or exec a string, and there's a module for parsing Python code so you can e.g. analyze Python programs for errors. In particular there are no macros. (But there were no macros in Lisp until sometime around 1970, either, and in some Lisps until well after that.) If it's embedded DSLs you want, you can do quite a bit in that direction by overriding __getattribute__ and operators. Python is, however, reflective. Are functions first class objects in Python (I've not looked into it)? Yes, to the same extent as in a statically-scoped Lisp, and therefore to a greater extent than in older dynamically-scoped Lisps (elisp, any Lisp before 1976, most Lisps before Common Lisp). There's a minor syntactic annoyance, which is that Python distinguishes expressions from statements, and if you want to create a closure that contains statements, you can't do it in the middle of an expression; you have to do it in a def statement, which assigns it a name that you can then use inside an expression. But that's a purely syntactic constraint; it doesn't affect the power of the language. On SICP: don't rush yourself. If it's going slowly, you may not be ready to go fast through a certain part of it yet. SICP is like a sushi dinner prepared by one of the world's best chefs: you can enjoy it enormously, but if you force it down your gullet as fast as it will go, you will be missing out on a lot. Worse, it may not stay down. Wait until your appetite has had a chance to recover before ordering another plate of uni. Maybe come back tomorrow. From: ext_197072

2009-07-03 09:32 pm (UTC)

Grandson of Pascal - Oberon 2 and Component Pascal I've found Oberon 2 and the commercial (though now open source) BlackBox Component Pascal to have a lot of the organismic qualities of Lisp. They were developed by Wirth and some of his grad students.



See oberon.ch/blackbox.html for more info (auf Deutch, but the docs in the downloadable (Windows only) version are in English).



Component Pascal has also available compilers for .NET and JVM, with an IDE available from CFB Software: http://www.cfbsoftware.com/cpide/cpide.aspx (see there for links to the compilers. From: kreelman

2009-07-09 06:42 am (UTC)

Re: Grandson of Pascal - Oberon 2 and Component Pascal Hmmm,

I've not looked into them. I might have a look. Thanks

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