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@molaram 1) I didn't praise Pharo, I just said that I was going there instead. Your reading comprehension skills might need some fine tuning.
2) Message passing in Pharo is everything, as such it requires a particular way of dealing with the entire language, this includes mathematical operations as well as their ordering. That is by language design, not by flaw of implementation.
That is the "why why why?!" Which would not have happened knowing the language a little bit better other than by giving it a couple of minutes. I also don't mean to be a dick, it just rubs me the wrong way when people talk smack about something without really knowing about it :P Ruby is beautiful tho :D -
@frankot I would argue that had the language no especification for it as well as an adversary flaw in the system be present then yes. It would be a very much wtf moment. For example, say that we tried doing the same item in Python and we got 70, in the language spec it does not mention anything about message passing or how this would affect the order of operations. Indeed, we were expecting common behavior to give us back 52, but say that for example Python gave 70 with no indication as to why. That to me would be a wtf moment indeed. But Pharo's documentation explicitly states that due to the nature of the 3 types of messages that it has in terms of precedence that the mathematical order of operations is different. 2 + (5 * 10) and voila! we get the correct answer. This to me does not constitute a wtf moment being that it is by design and stated across the language's specification.
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I know that clojure is heavily used by financial institutions. Also sabre which is traveling conglomerate use lisp for their systems. There is allegrograph database and when you look at clients you will see some range. It's not like it will disappear it's just less present in mass media but it's more present in critical systems where professionals work. They rarely share knowledge compared to script kiddies.
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Can confirm. I know a team writing a voip app entirely in clojure. Their costs are astronomical and they can't find people.
It's a beautiful language, but we're 10 years from FP being mainline, and I don't know if lisps will every really make a significant dent. Sucks, I'd love to see more macros and metaprogramming across the board. -
@vane
Haskell has been consuming a lot of work that was previously owned by lisps in fintech of late. -
@SortOfTested Probably you're right cause I'm not in finance business anymore and trying to not work there anymore.
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@vane
That's a very reasonable approach to life in general.
How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:
Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.
Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.
But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.
Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.
I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.
To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.
Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.
rant
and i will be happy for it
lisp will die