Does it really matter? There's a point in every Lisper's life, a threshold after which the question becomes immaterial - you'd stop thinking about intricacies of whatever Lisp and focus on the platform specifics instead. Any given day I might program in three-four different Lisp dialects, e.g. Clojure/Clourescript, Fennel, Elisp, Janet, etc. and it practically feels like I'm using the same PL. While switching between TS and JS (same family) never feels even close - there's always some mental burden.
not philosophically, but certainly practically. To double down, if all lisps are roughly equivalent from a language POV, then you'd want to pick the one or two that will give you the most practical advantage (libraries, documentation, dev environment, etc.)
I would call these different dialects of Lisp. The data doesn’t have to be a function. It’s illustrative. The patterns of application still work. What’s the difference if delimiters are different or if you are calling JVM libraries? The high-level ideas are still right there. Consider JavaScript. It is definitely not a Lisp, but if you model it as Lisp in C’s clothes, then all of a sudden IIFEs make total sense. The point is that it’s a helpful mental model for languages other than Lisp.
Limitation is the wrong way to think about things when computational equivalence is in play. It's about mental foundation. Lisp at its core is like driving a Turing machine, Clojure is not.
If the difference didn't matter, we wouldn't have so many different lisps. Obviously the difference mattered enough to the people that created Common Lisp when Scheme already existed. Rich Hickey thought it mattered when he created a completely new Lisp instead of just porting Scheme to the JVM.
> If the difference didn't matter, we wouldn't have so many different lisps
Literally the opposite. We can make and use so many, because writing them is more or less the same. We can quickly throw together a new lisp for a new platform or such and use it without problem.
Technically when you write in the domain, you are effectively making your own Lisp and then using it. It’s one of the amazing things that macros can do.
It's the mustard seed that keeps growing! And without the fragmentation other PL's suffer from, which are reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, conversely.
There's always a response that his work is "anti-establishment", despite it often giving support of the establishment's viewpoints (read: liberal).
The hypocrisy seems lost on his fans/proponents.
Just imagine thinking this piece is somehow anti-establishment / thorn in the side of power, yet it was erected in one of the most surveilled areas in London and he's somehow got away with it?
There are so many people complaining about the Nix language while offering zero constructive criticism. I was a little skeptical about them using a custom language at first. But then as I used it more it grew on me and I understand why it is the way it is.
People just seem to want to complain because it doesn't look like any of their favorite languages and they aren't familiar with functional languages. At this point, I can't imagine using any other language in place of Nix. The code would have so much noise and be much harder to read.
You know, I'm not going to say I'm enamored with the language, but I think the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in because I really don't hate the language so much anymore.
I mean, I'm only ever using it for configurations, and I think I'd still prefer writing Nix than YAML. I probably wouldn't like writing a full "program" with Nix, but I don't think anyone does that?
Sounds like every programming language on the planet. Just skip the "i'm unfamiliar with it, so i hate it" phase, and everything will be fine. People spend more time repeating that simple POV, using thousands of varying words, than is healthy. Just shut up, and do the work. And if you're not going to put in the work, just shut up, and let everyone else get to work.
I mean I don't know that I agree with that completely. Languages can still be actively awful even if you do learn them.
I have written a lot of PHP. In order to learn it I bought several books, I've done a dozen or so projects with it at various jobs, I've written both trivial and non-trivial things, and I have come to the conclusion that PHP is an actively terrible language [1]. It's inconsistent and hard to write in any kind of maintainable way with an ugly syntax and generally-crappy performance for any kind of logic beyond CRUD.
[1] At least version 5, which is the last version I've used. I've heard 7 is better but I'll never know because I swore an oath in blood that I would not do PHP again for less than a million dollars a year.
Thank you! I built it because I needed it. Current Data Lake catalogues are terrible with representing Iceberg tables, so I just built something for that purpose.
I am not happy with the Catalogue UX right now so I'll iterate on that a bit more.
I'll be hopefully implementing realtime monitoring of snapshots and other table aspects too.
Please let me know if you find issues or have suggestions (raise a Github Issue)!
