

The Next Lisp: Back to the Future - parenthesis
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/nextlisp(1).htm

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parenthesis
But it seems Mark Tarver (the author) is ending his work on Qi:

[http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/5927...](http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/592773c562017d87)

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bayareaguy
I find it amusing that although Mr. Tarver himself seems to admit his ideas on
the future of Lisp could be better presented by omitting his strawman
arguments supposedly debunking the "ecomonics" of open source efforts, he
nonetheless can't seem to restrain himself from including them.

My suggestion to Mr. Tarver: if you want me to take your language ideas
seriously, save your "opinionating" until after your technical ideas are
widely adopted. As much as I'd like to try out a promising language like Qi,
an ideological rant against open source won't help convince me or anyone else
it's a good idea.

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mjgoins
And to make his rant painful on top of unconvincing, he confuses free-as-in-
speech with gratis.

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paracelsus
No. He starts talking about FOSS - MIT and BSD stuff. This is nearly in every
case free economically. And the GPL stuff is almost always free economically
too. In practice if you give people complete freedom over sources you really
have to give them the same freedom you have to change and distribute. So by
undercutting price tends aymptotically to zero. People know that and so they
make it free from the outset. They make their money from hand-holding.

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mjgoins
My understanding of what he said was - to paraphrase and re-interpret a bit -
"Free software is BS, because nothing is (as you put it) 'free economically'."

That's two meanings of the word 'free' in one proposition. The first refers to
the rights of the users, and the second refers to putting in labor or cash to
create something. The fact that the two might be closely related in practice
doesn't matter. For this to work, you'd have to make the additional claim
"Free-as-in-Speech is identical to Free-as-in-Beer", which would be insane.
See: OpenBSD's cd sales.

Additionally, he's throwing in a third concept, which we could safely call
"Free-as-in-Lunch".

What he seems to believe is "Free-as-in-Speech software is BS because nothing
is Free-as-in-Lunch". Which I still disagree with, but I think would be a more
direct way of expressing the point without using confusion about "free" to a
rhetorical advantage.

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miked
>> 1\. Recursion as the primary mean of expressing procedure calling.

Does anyone know what that statement means?

The author misses the real essence of Lisp, which is that:

1) a single data structure, the heterogeneous list, can be used to express
everything in the language, including the program itself.

2) the linear nature of lists makes it easy to recurse on them, thereby
enabling significant use of recursion as a control structure, thereby
simplifying the reasoning process about the code.

3) the simplicity and pervasiveness of the list structure makes it easy to
write macros in the language, thereby increasing the range of abstractions
that the language can express.

4) bindings are dynamic, increasing language flexibility and making the use of
a REPL even more valuable.

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anc2020
I think his point 1 was your point 2.

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anc2020
Makes some good points, but calling Python a sugaring on Lisp is a bit weird,
especially since it misses 3 of his 5 philosophies of Lisp.

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rw
Do I hate that the only implementation of Qi is not fully FOSS? Yes.

Do I love this essay? Yes.

