NYC LOCAL: Tuesday 14 August 2007 Lisp NYC: Perry Metzger on Otter, the new salty slick whiskered snow-bellying programming system
secr...@lxny.org
what="official Lisp NYC announcement">
From: Heow Eide-Goodman <li...@alphageeksinc.com>
To: LispNYC <li...@lispnyc.org>
Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:19:47 -0400
Subject: [Lisp] Reminder: Lisp Meeting: August 14th 7:00 at Trinity
T-minus 7 days to OtterLaunch!
CL-USER> (decode-universal-time 3396121200)
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Please join us for our next meeting on Tuesday, August 14th from 7:00
to 9:00 at Trinity Lutheran Church.
Perry Metzger Presents: Otter, a new dialect of Lisp.
Otter is strongly influenced by Scheme and Python, with some
bits of inspiration from Common Lisp, Perl and other
languages thrown in, as well as some strange ideas Perry
came up up with on his own. The results may be pleasing to
some and are guaranteed to be repulsive to others. If you're
tired of waiting for Paul Graham to release Arc, you may
find Otter interesting. If you don't care if Paul Graham
ever releases Arc, you may also find Otter interesting. In
the unlikely event that all goes according to plan, a
prototype Otter interpreter.
Perry Metzger is a long time ne'er-do-well and agent provocateur. He
subsists largely on cruciferous vegetables, and rarely turns down a
chance to nap. Besides designing Otter, he is currently learning how to
distinguish different organic solvents by scent alone. He lives in New
York with a purple haired woman and many elderly computers whom he cares
for in their golden years.
Resources:
Directions to Trinity:
Trinity Lutheran
602 E. 9th St. & Ave B., on Tompkins Square Park
http://trinitylowereastside.org/
From N,R,Q,W (8th Street NYU Stop) and the 4,5 (Astor Street Stop):
Walk East 4 blocks on St. Marks, cross Tompkins Square Park.
From F&V (2nd Ave Stop):
Walk E one or two blocks, turn north for 8 short blocks
From L (1st Ave Stop):
Walk E one block, turn sounth for 5 short blocks
The M9 bus line drops you off at the doorstep and the M15 is near get
off on St. Marks & 1st)
To get there by car, take the FDR (East River Drive) to Houston then
go NW till you're at 9th & B. Week-night parking isn't bad at all,
but if you're paranoid about your Caddy or in a hurry, there is a
parking garage on 9th between 1st and 3rd Ave.
_______________________________________________
Lisp mailing list
Li...@lispnyc.org
http://www.lispnyc.org:8080/mailman/listinfo/lisp
</blockquote>
Distributed poC TINC:
Jay Sulzberger <secr...@lxny.org>
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org
Ken Tilton
would like. The author is a hard-core schemer, and Arc's Prime Directive
is to be minimalist. Like Scheme.
Get it?
kt
--
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/
"Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic." - John Ray
"As long as algebra is taught in school,
there will be prayer in school." - Cokie Roberts
"Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra."
- Fran Lebowitz
"I'm an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive."
- Tim Allen
Stefan Scholl
>
> http://www.otterlang.org/
Cute otters. Can they speak lolcat?
--
Web (en): http://www.no-spoon.de/ -*- Web (de): http://www.frell.de/
are
> Please join us for our next meeting on Tuesday, August 14th from 7:00
> to 9:00 at Trinity Lutheran Church.
>
> Perry Metzger Presents: Otter, a new dialect of Lisp.
Would anyone who was there care to enlighten the rest of us about
Otter?
Ken Tilton
Too easy?: http://www.otterlang.org/
Well, it will get better. Mailing list was shown on a slide, but I
thought the above link would be enough to remember. You might pester
Perry on the LispNYC list.
Basically the goal is to be able to do high-performance computing in
something other than C and something like Scheme, Common Lisp, Python,
Ruby, and Arc. Two notations, ala Dylan, so one can go more succinct at
the cost of extra syntax and !%^[]#!@ stuff.
kt
Ken Tilton
Ken Tilton wrote:
>
>
> are wrote:
>
>> On 12 Aug, 19:32, secret...@lxny.org wrote:
>>
>>> Please join us for our next meeting on Tuesday, August 14th from 7:00
>>> to 9:00 at Trinity Lutheran Church.
>>>
>>> Perry Metzger Presents: Otter, a new dialect of Lisp.
>>
>>
>>
>> Would anyone who was there care to enlighten the rest of us about
>> Otter?
>>
>
> Too easy?: http://www.otterlang.org/
also
http://lispnyc.org/wiki.clp?page=past-meetings
kt
Rainer Joswig
Ken Tilton <kenny...@optonline.net> wrote:
> are wrote:
> > On 12 Aug, 19:32, secret...@lxny.org wrote:
> >
> >> Please join us for our next meeting on Tuesday, August 14th from 7:00
> >> to 9:00 at Trinity Lutheran Church.
> >>
> >> Perry Metzger Presents: Otter, a new dialect of Lisp.
> >
> >
> > Would anyone who was there care to enlighten the rest of us about
> > Otter?
> >
>
> Too easy?: http://www.otterlang.org/
>
> Well, it will get better. Mailing list was shown on a slide, but I
> thought the above link would be enough to remember. You might pester
> Perry on the LispNYC list.
>
> Basically the goal is to be able to do high-performance computing in
> something other than C and something like Scheme, Common Lisp, Python,
> Ruby, and Arc. Two notations, ala Dylan, so one can go more succinct at
> the cost of extra syntax and !%^[]#!@ stuff.
>
> kt
New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
Otter http://www.otterlang.org/
nu http://blog.neontology.com/posts/2007/08/11/whats-nu
e7 http://e7code.org/
Vista Smalltalk http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/architectural-overview/
Any others I have missed (and is not L#, Arc, 'newLISP', Croma,
Goo)?
are
>
> New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
> incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
each in his own direction?
> Any others I have missed (and is not L#, Arc, 'newLISP',
> Croma, Goo)?
Pico Lisp: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/search/node/pico+lisp
Christopher Koppler
> On 16 Aug, 09:40, Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:
>
> > New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
> > incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
>
> This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
> sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
> nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
> each in his own direction?
Perhaps it's in the nature of Lisp. This seems to be one more
characteristic Lisp has in common with Forth - ease of creating at
least an interpreter and very uniform syntax may be the main culprits.
> > Any others I have missed (and is not L#, Arc, 'newLISP',
> > Croma, Goo)?
>
> Pico Lisp:http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/search/node/pico+lisp
Is the T Revival project still going strong?
Pillsy
[...]
> Any others I have missed (and is not L#, Arc, 'newLISP', Croma,
> Goo)?
Does Qi count?
Qi: http://www.lambdassociates.org/aboutqi.htm
Cheers,
Pillsy
Pascal Costanza
> On 16 Aug, 09:40, Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:
>> New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
>> incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
>
> This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
> sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
> nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
> each in his own direction?
Yes, and a few cannot resist the temptation. It seems to be part of the
learning curve at some stage, and it seems to take considerably more
learning to understand that developing a new dialect doesn't really pay
off, or requires an enormous amount of work to make it _substantially_
better than existing ones.
Pascal
--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
Pascal Costanza
No, because the designers of Qi have taken the right approach: to embed
a new dialect as an extension of an existing one.
Perry E. Metzger
Ken Tilton <kenny...@optonline.net> writes:
> Basically the goal is to be able to do high-performance computing in
> something other than C and something like Scheme, Common Lisp, Python,
> Ruby, and Arc.
Not really. :)
> Two notations, ala Dylan, so one can go more succinct at the cost of
> extra syntax and !%^[]#!@ stuff.
Actually, there is only one notation, but I added on some new
syntactic sugar (similar in flavor to other forms of lisp syntactic
sugar, such as the use of 'a to mean (quote a).
The reason for the new syntactic sugar is to make it easier to deal
with complicated data structures using notation compact enough to make
them convenient. I think the video of my talk explains it pretty well.
The web site, http://www.otterlang.org/, currently is empty, but that
should change in a week or so. Meanwhile, one can subscribe to the
announcements mailing list by sending mail to announce...@otterlang.org
Perry
Perry E. Metzger
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> writes:
> New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
> incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
Prop...@gmx.net writes:
> This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
> sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
> nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
> each in his own direction?
New Lisp dialects are not a new hobby -- they are a very old
hobby. From 1960 to about 1985, new lisp dialects flourished, and with
them new ideas and new visions of what Lisp could do and what it
could become.
On a regular basis, new Lisps would appear, and with them, new
frontiers were crossed. Lexical scoping, object systems, even such
basic tools as strings as a first class type, were tried out in new
dialects, and ultimately spread and made the community stronger.
Since the development of Common Lisp and the AI winter, it has become
unfashionable to create new dialects, and a dim view has been taken of
experimentation. Some claim that new dialects divide the community,
and that there is nothing to learn from the new dialects. Orthodoxy
has set in, as well as stagnation, and the main dialect has remained
largely untouched in fifteen years, on a basis that is 25 years
old. The community has also, sadly, turned inwards and looked back to
the past instead of towards the future -- one hears constant laments
for Lisp Machines and other parts of the glorious golden age of yore,
instead of about what we can do next.
The emergence of new dialects of Lisp is not a sign of trouble. It is
a sign that the community is finally regaining its health. Springtime
has come at last after a long ice age, new flowers are growing where
the glaciers have receded. I'm glad of it.
Let a hundred flowers bloom: let a hundred schools of thought contend.
Perry
Rainer Joswig
"Perry E. Metzger" <pe...@piermont.com> wrote:
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> writes:
> > New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
> > incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
>
> Prop...@gmx.net writes:
> > This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
> > sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
> > nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
> > each in his own direction?
>
> New Lisp dialects are not a new hobby -- they are a very old
> hobby. From 1960 to about 1985, new lisp dialects flourished, and with
> them new ideas and new visions of what Lisp could do and what it
> could become.
>
> On a regular basis, new Lisps would appear, and with them, new
> frontiers were crossed. Lexical scoping, object systems, even such
> basic tools as strings as a first class type, were tried out in new
> dialects, and ultimately spread and made the community stronger.
I doubt that you need a new Lisp dialect to try out
dot notation for access of array data. Not in 2007.
Not in 1980.
> Since the development of Common Lisp and the AI winter, it has become
> unfashionable to create new dialects, and a dim view has been taken of
> experimentation.
The experimentation has moved to a different level. Once
you have a stable base language, you still can experiment with
libraries, interfacing, tools, ...
> Some claim that new dialects divide the community,
> and that there is nothing to learn from the new dialects.
I won't say that there is nothing to learn from new dialects.
The implementor of a new dialect will learn how difficult
it is to create a good language, a good implementation,
good documentation and good libraries. Maybe some person years (ten?) to
get basics going. I have high respect for that.
> Orthodoxy
> has set in, as well as stagnation, and the main dialect has remained
> largely untouched in fifteen years, on a basis that is 25 years
> old. The community has also, sadly, turned inwards and looked back to
> the past instead of towards the future -- one hears constant laments
> for Lisp Machines and other parts of the glorious golden age of yore,
> instead of about what we can do next.
Personally I'd like to move back and forward at the same time.
There is the vision of a workstation that is built for
the (Lisp) programmer. From the ground. Then there is the
vision of a software environment that is powerful enough
to support programming for most current purposes. Then there
is the vision of being able to develop state-of-the art
software that integrates with current operating systems,
so that you get the power of interactive programming even
for those. These visions have some overlap. Some people
are trying to work on different versions of the vision.
For example to make Lisp implementations good citizens
in a GNU/Linux environment (there is a log activity in this
area). But these different visions can be moved
forward while using the same base language. It makes
the exchange of ideas and code much easier.
I'm personally totally uninterested in 'new' 'languages'
that focus on micro-advancing the state of syntactic
expressibility. Also, if a new language is developed without
software, it is not worth it. If it claims to be better,
more modern, whatever, it should be able to demonstrate that
and to compete with other Lisp systems. I'm somehow interested
in a Lisp implementation, but I'm MUCH more interested
in using/writing software applications written and extended in
(Common) Lisp.
That's also what has happened. Quite a few people have 're-'
discovered Lisp and tried to apply it to some (new) domains.
There are now several active implementations and many people
able to maintain them. There are now people experimenting
how to develop software, what the environment should look
like for that (given the current surroundings), what
tools one needs in the Internet age (project sites,
chat channels, web forums, bots, paste boards, ...).
> The emergence of new dialects of Lisp is not a sign of trouble. It is
> a sign that the community is finally regaining its health. Springtime
> has come at last after a long ice age, new flowers are growing where
> the glaciers have receded. I'm glad of it.
For me the sign of spring would be Lisp software, not Lisp
dialects.
John Thingstad
>
> For me the sign of spring would be Lisp software, not Lisp
> dialects.
>
I see both.
At least in the sense that there has been a explosion in the number of
libraries in the last few years.
Perhaps there is room for some new dialects?
Rainer Joswig
"John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> wrote:
But what for? What is not possible with CL or Scheme, ISLISP?
You could even revive some old attempt like EuLisp and
Dylan. More thought went into them than you can ever
hope to have time.
To get some 'radical' new syntax, you need a new dialect?
Check out the Otter presentation:
http://www.lispnyc.org/wiki.clp?page=past-meetings
(Side note: Perry should not be discouraged. If he
wants to do that, he will do it anyway. But some criticism/discussion
upfront can't be bad? ;-) ).
His plan is basically not realistic for a single person.
Getting a cool Lisp language and a high-performance
implementation is certainly a nice goal. But far from
easy to achieve. He admits that in his presentation.
Let's see how far he gets.
Influenced by Scheme, Python, Arc, Common Lisp, and Perl.
So that basically means you get a bunch of ideas which
are not easily made to work well together.
It has been too long since there has been a new Lisp
This misses all the other attempts. EuLisp, ISLISP, Dylan,
plus quite a lot of smaller attempts like
e7, l#, Pico Lisp, and a bunch of others...
Plus new versions of Scheme (the core)
with lots of new language extensions (see SRFI).
(! somehash["myname"].val "Perry")
Please. You need a new dialect for that? In which way
is that 'radical'?
Why can't I have fun too?
That's a valid reason.
Optimizing compiler good enough for heavy math (like computational
chemistry).
That's tough.
Interpreter + system & text hacking features good enough that no one need
ever use Perl again.
Currently if you use CL or something like scsh, you won't need that
much PERL.
If people keep having to go to the reference manual for something, that
something is badly designed.
You can only say that if you start. After a while any project
needs documentation or easy to understand source code
(self documenting).
no format strings
Fine for me. For that I don't need a new langauge. Just
programmer guidelines and a few lines of library code.
def instead of defun
Talking about 'radical'.
compact names?
Obfuscation built in. Great. Not.
It is too difficult to use real data structures in Lisp.
Is it?
REGEXPs
I thought that topic is done. Edi Weitz has a CL lib for that.
Olin Shivers explained how REGEXPs could be better done
in Scheme (1998).
Compilation, No rebinding of identifiers in other modules
See the ANSI CL pages about compilation.
And so on. I don't find most of that very radical. There
is nothing which you can't do with a bit of coding
for, say, SBCL to have it look like what he describes.
more in another post...
Rainer Joswig
> På Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:05:30 +0200, skrev Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de>:
>
> >
> > For me the sign of spring would be Lisp software, not Lisp
> > dialects.
> >
>
> I see both.
> At least in the sense that there has been a explosion in the number of
> libraries in the last few years.
That's definitely good. Some consolidation might be needed,
plus some more apps using it. But there is lots
of progress, that I think new dialects are not that much needed.
What could be more interesting is to take the
implementations and improve them in some (multi-core, distributed
computation, better maths performance, better app packaging,
...) or create some nice 'distributions' with libs, environment
and compiler.
> Perhaps there is room for some new dialects?
I have been reading the latest discussions about the new
Scheme R6RS.
To me R6RS looks like a new language. It moves further away
from Lisp ideas and morphs into something that is hard to
describe.
There again with R6RS is a language where the motivations
for the design are not clear to me and are not proven
by experimentation.
Tamas Papp
> (! somehash["myname"].val "Perry")
>
> Please. You need a new dialect for that? In which way
> is that 'radical'?
Even though I don't know much about language design, I don't
understand what is wrong with prefix syntax like (aref myarray 12). I
find it more convenient than the "traditional" myarray[12], and I have
worked in languages that use the latter syntax (C, Fortran, R,
Mathematica) for years. I don't want to start another prefix-infix
thread, but to me the Otter syntax would not be an improvement.
Moreover, the [] syntax misses the point that sometimes there are
extra arguments besides the key or the index. Eg
(gethash (cons i j) sparse-matrix 0)
that I used for sparse matrices. You need to use different operators,
or push all kinds of ugliness into []. See where this lead for R:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-lang.html#Index-constructions
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-lang.html#Indexing
There are many badly designed Lisps around, eg Lush (dynamic scoping!
*shudder*). OTOH, I find CL extremely well designed: whenever I run
into something I consider a shortcoming, a closer look reveals it was
not bad choice.
Tamas
John Thingstad
>
> But what for? What is not possible with CL or Scheme, ISLISP?
> You could even revive some old attempt like EuLisp and
> Dylan. More thought went into them than you can ever
> hope to have time.
>
Because we are not still solving the same problems.
I was thinking more about dotlist (http://dotlisp.sourceforge.net)
A Lisp written over CLR and with full access to .NET.
Naturally .NET class system is radically different from CLOS and it would
be interesting to explore how to do this. Then perhaps bring some of the
experience back to Common Lisp.
Pascal Costanza
> Perhaps there is room for some new dialects?
It is very hard to create a Lisp dialect that is _substantially_ better
than the ones we already have (Common Lisp, Scheme, ISLISP, Dylan and
some others). Yes, it is possible to make shallow improvements, but
almost all such improvements can be made from within those dialects,
most of the time in a very straightforward way. (I would consider an
improvement to be substantial only if it cannot be done from within one
of those dialects.)
I don't see a value in new Lisp dialects that are only better at such
superficial levels. What's even worse is that these new Lisp dialects
are typically implemented from scratch, which means that decades of
experience with efficient implementation techniques are lost and have to
rediscovered. Only few examples take the 'right' approach and embed new
dialects in existing ones - but due to the Lisp nature, it's hard to
consider them really new dialects, they are typically considered "just"
libraries. [1]
Are libraries not sexy enough? Is that the reason why inventors of new
Lisp dialects prefer to start from scratch? Why do they put up with
implementing new Lisp dialects in languages like C, when they could as
well take advantage of Lisp from the start?
Where do you see value in having new Lisp dialects?
Pascal
[1] Is UCW a new Lisp dialect? Cells? ContextL? Qi?
Pascal Bourguignon
> [...]
> Are libraries not sexy enough? Is that the reason why inventors of new
> Lisp dialects prefer to start from scratch? Why do they put up with
> implementing new Lisp dialects in languages like C, when they could as
> well take advantage of Lisp from the start?
>
> Where do you see value in having new Lisp dialects?
There's even another dimension that's underexploited IMO, it's that
Common Lisp allow for subsets of the language.
A lot of these "new" lisp implementations would be much more
interesting if they were developed as a subset of Common Lisp (with
possibly some implementation specific packages).
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
NOTE: The most fundamental particles in this product are held
together by a "gluing" force about which little is currently known
and whose adhesive power can therefore not be permanently
guaranteed.
Pascal Costanza
> Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes:
>> [...]
>> Are libraries not sexy enough? Is that the reason why inventors of new
>> Lisp dialects prefer to start from scratch? Why do they put up with
>> implementing new Lisp dialects in languages like C, when they could as
>> well take advantage of Lisp from the start?
>>
>> Where do you see value in having new Lisp dialects?
>
> There's even another dimension that's underexploited IMO, it's that
> Common Lisp allow for subsets of the language.
>
> A lot of these "new" lisp implementations would be much more
> interesting if they were developed as a subset of Common Lisp (with
> possibly some implementation specific packages).
I'd consider ISLISP an example of a subset of Common Lisp. And I think
ISLISP would be a good starting point for such dialects, at least better
than starting from scratch.
Pascal
Rainer Joswig
Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> wrote:
> Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> > Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes:
> >> [...]
> >> Are libraries not sexy enough? Is that the reason why inventors of new
> >> Lisp dialects prefer to start from scratch? Why do they put up with
> >> implementing new Lisp dialects in languages like C, when they could as
> >> well take advantage of Lisp from the start?
> >>
> >> Where do you see value in having new Lisp dialects?
> >
> > There's even another dimension that's underexploited IMO, it's that
> > Common Lisp allow for subsets of the language.
> >
> > A lot of these "new" lisp implementations would be much more
> > interesting if they were developed as a subset of Common Lisp (with
> > possibly some implementation specific packages).
>
> I'd consider ISLISP an example of a subset of Common Lisp. And I think
> ISLISP would be a good starting point for such dialects, at least better
> than starting from scratch.
It was not that unusual to base a Lisp on a subset of CL.
Interleaf Lisp is similar to CL.
(now called Quicksilver, a publishing suite for
large scale documents)
" "Interleaf 6" is a document authoring and composition package. It
provides an integrated set of tools for creating compound documents:
word processing, graphics, data-driven business charts, tables,
equations, image editing, automated page layout, book building-
including automatic index and TOC, conditional document assembly. It
includes several features engineered to support the production of large
and complex document sets, including: centralized control over parts
or all of a document (format and/or content), global search and
replace/change on individual graphics objects regardless of specific
orientation or position, revision management.
Also available (on some platforms) is the optional Developer's Toolkit
(DTK) for customizing or extending the capabilities of the above
authoring tool. Developer's Toolkit is used to write programs in
Interleaf Lisp. Interleaf Lisp is similar to CommonLISP, but it also
contains an extensive set of classes, methods, and functions for
examining and changing almost all Interleaf objects, including
documents and their contents. DTK includes an editor, debugger,
compiler, listener, interpreter, and on-line documentation. Lisp code
developed with DTK, or even written with an ordinary editor, can be
executed by the stock system, so that customization or the provision of
special functionality is not limited to installations with DTK. In
fact, much of the distributed system is written in Lisp."
CLICC's CL0
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~wg/clicc.html
CLiCC supports a strict and very large subset CL0
(Common Lisp0) of Common Lisp + CLOS.
EUSLisp, an object-oriented Lisp for robot-programming
http://www.etl.go.jp/~matsui/eus/
LinkLisp.
muLISP has a compatibility package.
Ken Tilton
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Ken Tilton <kenny...@optonline.net> writes:
>
>>Basically the goal is to be able to do high-performance computing in
>>something other than C and something like Scheme, Common Lisp, Python,
>>Ruby, and Arc.
>
>
> Not really. :)
You better go read your slides.
>
>
>>Two notations, ala Dylan, so one can go more succinct at the cost of
>>extra syntax and !%^[]#!@ stuff.
>
>
> Actually, there is only one notation, but I added on some new
> syntactic sugar...
So it's a two-notation system with one-notation. Excellent.
> The web site, http://www.otterlang.org/, currently is empty, but that
> should change in a week or so.
Is your objective to avoid as much as possible the adoption boost you
would get from having the web site ready at the same time you are
driving people to it with public appearances, NG postings, and that
Times Square billboard I saw? (hint)
Ken Tilton
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> writes:
>
>>New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
>>incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
>
>
> Prop...@gmx.net writes:
>
>>This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
>>sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
>>nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
>>each in his own direction?
>
>
> New Lisp dialects are not a new hobby -- they are a very old
> hobby. From 1960 to about 1985, new lisp dialects flourished, and with
> them new ideas and new visions of what Lisp could do and what it
> could become.
>
> On a regular basis, new Lisps would appear, and with them, new
> frontiers were crossed. Lexical scoping, object systems, even such
> basic tools as strings as a first class type, were tried out in new
> dialects, and ultimately spread and made the community stronger.
>
> Since the development of Common Lisp and the AI winter, it has become
> unfashionable to create new dialects, and a dim view has been taken of
> experimentation. Some claim that new dialects divide the community,
> and that there is nothing to learn from the new dialects. Orthodoxy
> has set in, as well as stagnation, and the main dialect has remained
> largely untouched in fifteen years, on a basis that is 25 years
> old.
Where you see stagnation I see completeness, where you see age I see,
"oh, it's done, let's get to work on some applications".
> The community has also, sadly, turned inwards and looked back to
> the past instead of towards the future -- one hears constant laments
> for Lisp Machines and other parts of the glorious golden age of yore,
> instead of about what we can do next.
>
> The emergence of new dialects of Lisp is not a sign of trouble. It is
> a sign that the community is finally regaining its health.
Aw, jeez, cue the violins.
> Springtime
> has come at last after a long ice age, new flowers are growing where
> the glaciers have receded. I'm glad of it.
And the horn section goes wild.
>
> Let a hundred flowers bloom: let a hundred schools of thought contend.
I recall call/CC from Scheme, an object model from Python, macros from
CL, static compilation at the cost of language dynamism from C/C++,
notation from APL, and type inferencing from some retarded family of
languages I forget.
Methinks your blooming blossoms need dusting.
Was there any new idea in Otter, or just a different combo of the old?
And now you have to create an entire language, compiler, reference,
support, debugger, etc, etc..... I woulda used Lisp.
Oh, I did: Cells, a new idea (prior art was pushing up daisies), in
pure, portable CL. At the time I also coined Tilton's Law: Make new
datatypes, not new languages.
hth, kt
Perry E. Metzger
Ken Tilton <kenny...@optonline.net> writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Ken Tilton <kenny...@optonline.net> writes:
>>>Basically the goal is to be able to do high-performance computing in
>>>something other than C and something like Scheme, Common Lisp, Python,
>>>Ruby, and Arc.
>>
>> Not really. :)
>
> You better go read your slides.
I'm reminded of the essay by Isaac Asimov in which he described going
up to a professor who had lectured on one of his stories and explained
"actually, that's not what I meant at all when I wrote that", to which
the professor replied "just because you wrote the story doesn't mean
you know what it means"...
--
Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com
joseph...@gmail.com
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> writes:
> > (! somehash["myname"].val "Perry")
>
> > Please. You need a new dialect for that? In which way
> > is that 'radical'?
>
> Even though I don't know much about language design, I don't
> understand what is wrong with prefix syntax like (aref myarray 12). I
> find it more convenient than the "traditional" myarray[12], and I have
> worked in languages that use the latter syntax (C, Fortran, R,
> Mathematica) for years. I don't want to start another prefix-infix
> thread, but to me the Otter syntax would not be an improvement.
I think Rainer's point is that one can experiment with new syntaxes by
creating replacements for "READ" with different ideas about read-
macros, for instance, without giving up all the benefits of existing
Common Lisp implementations. Surface syntax is superficial.
Even more substantial things like making generic sequences probably
only require minor tweaks to existing implementations, although these
could conceivably break existing CL code.
Starting from scratch with a new implementation is an interesting
learning exercise, but mostly to be kept to oneself rather than
polished up for the world. Better to take what you learn and apply it
to projects that are already mature.
Klaus Schilling
> Pillsy wrote:
>> On Aug 16, 4:40 am, Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Any others I have missed (and is not L#, Arc, 'newLISP', Croma,
>>> Goo)?
>> Does Qi count?
>> Qi: http://www.lambdassociates.org/aboutqi.htm
>
> No, because the designers of Qi have taken the right approach: to
> embed a new dialect as an extension of an existing one.
>
do Rep, Reflisp, Xlispstat, Lush, Hedgehog, and EuLisp count?
Klaus Schilling
Klaus Schilling
> On 16 Aug., 11:15, are <Propon...@gmx.net> wrote:
>> On 16 Aug, 09:40, Rainer Joswig <jos...@lisp.de> wrote:
>>
>> > New Lisp dialects seem to be the new hobby. They are mostly
>> > incompatible to existing and emerging dialects.
>>
>> This makes one worry that no replacement for CL will ever become
>> sufficiently widespread as to be truly viable. Is it perhaps in the
>> nature of people who are attracted to Lisp that they tend to go off
>> each in his own direction?
Are Asperger's and similar symdromes more common among
Lisp-loving programmers than usual?
>
> Perhaps it's in the nature of Lisp. This seems to be one more
> characteristic Lisp has in common with Forth - ease of creating at
> least an interpreter and very uniform syntax may be the main culprits.
>
it takes me 100 times more effort to write the same thing in a language
with irregular syntax than it takes me with a Symbolic-Expression syntax
language.
Klaus Schilling