

Lisp as Blub - mqt
http://damienkatz.net/2008/04/lisp_as_blub.html

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henning
I don't get it. The "blub" quality refers to expressiveness, not the
robustness of the runtime system or suitability for particular kinds of
application development.

To say that Arc is not concerned with brevity or expressiveness is simply
ridiculous.

For the record, I think the way Erlang supports functional programming isn't
particularly elegant and I think having Prolog-like syntax without Prolog-like
semantics is silly.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
_having Prolog-like syntax without Prolog-like semantics is silly._

Yes. Yes! I'm not the only one thinking it then!

I think the Erlang process model is brilliant but it really took on the
ugliness of the Prolog syntax without attaining the full benefits of the
Prolog logical semantics.

~~~
giardini
I think Erlang is brilliant because it keeps Prolog's unification (matching)
but discards Prolog's backtracking in favor of procedural execution.

Unification can be very useful in solving some problems. Backtracking is also
useful but sometimes gets in the way. Procedural code can be used to do
anything that any language can do and students are more familiar with it. So I
think Erlang is an interesting addition to languages. And that's without
considering it's more practical aspects, e.g., multiprocessing, failover
capability, etc.

Nor is Prolog syntax particularly ugly. A problem is that it is too simple, so
simple that novices can become confused. Brna, Boulay and Pain discuss why
Prolog is difficult in the book:

"Learning to Build and Comprehend Complex Information Structures: Prolog as a
Case Study" [http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Comprehend-Complex-
Informatio...](http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Comprehend-Complex-Information-
Structures/dp/1567504345/ref=sr_1_2/102-1192735-0366500?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208217565&sr=1-2)

See the review there by Randall Heltzerman titled "The Most Unlikely Book Ever
to be Published".

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pg
He's reading too much into this. At loads this low, it can't be a language
design issue. There's probably just a bug in Mzscheme.

Hard to say whether this post is deliberate linkbait or just overeagerness to
see this as evidence confirming a pre-existing bias. Probably a little of
both.

~~~
damienkatz
Confirming bias? Maybe. Link bait? Definitely.

But you say it likes it's a bad thing. Do you think I don't have a valid
point? Are you not debugging a memory leak in a production Lisp app?

With Lisp you can put together a site in a few hours. But how many days must
later be spent debugging issues like this? Will this time spent debugging be
counted against your productivity gains you attribute to Lisp?

This is exactly the sort of problem Erlang has nailed down. And it requires a
whole new thinking about program structure. Is it possible you don't see the
problems with Lisp because you can't imagine there is a fundamentally better
way?

~~~
apgwoz
> Are you not debugging a memory leak in a production Lisp app?

But, you're confusing the actual application with the Lisp implementation. Arc
(and Mzscheme for that matter) are not as mature as Erlang's 20 years (or
whatever). If this was running on a more mature Lisp system, I don't think
we'd be discussing the same thing.

~~~
davidw
You don't get to pick and choose implementations to compare. Mzscheme was
probably chosen because it's a pretty well known scheme implementation and
seems popular... likely because it's well done in many ways. But you have to
take the bad with the good.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
Maybe the problem is Arc's lack of tensile strength.

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raganwald
Interesting point about having a process-oriented architecture where each
process has its own independent GC, but boy-o-boy is the title a troll-tastic
piece of link-bait.

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mnemonicsloth
"Why current event X means we should all grind my favorite axe."

~~~
boorad
It's a pretty robust axe

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mroman
This guy sounds like a suit in a boardroom . . . just spouting words devoid of
validity . . .

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lst
If you want to prove something seriously, please find some more examples.
(Really!)

