Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.
One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.
It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.
Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.
One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.
One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.
One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.
English definitely has rules.
It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.
Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.
No.
There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.
For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.
Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.
Symbols display with friendly string-y names in a number of languages. Clojure, for example, has a symbol type.
And a number of languages display friendly strings for enumy things - Scala, Haskell, and Rust spring to mind.
The problem with strings over enums with a nice debugging display is that the string type is too wide. Strings don’t tell you what values are valid, strings don’t catch typos at compile time, and they’re murder when refactoring.
Clojure symbols are good at differentiation between symbolly things and strings, though they don’t catch typos.
The other problem the article mentions is strings over a proper struct/adt/class hierarchy is that strings don’t really have any structure to them. Concatenating strings is brittle compared to building up an AST then rendering it at the end.
Edit: autocorrect messed a few things up I didn’t catch.
Javascript is generally considered OOP, but classes weren’t widely available till 2017.
Inheritance isn’t fundamental to OOP, and neither are interfaces. You can have a duck- typed OOP language without inheritance, although I don’t know of any off the top of my head.
Honestly, the more fundamental thing about OOP is that it’s a programming style built around objects. Sometimes OO languages are class based, or duck typing based, etc. But you’ll always have your data carrying around it’s behavior at runtime.
keeping state (data) and behavior (functions) that operate on that state, together
Importantly, that’s “together at runtime”, not in terms of code organization. One of the important things about an object is that it has dynamic dispatch. Your object is a pointer both to the data itself and to the implementation that works on that data.
There’s a similar idea that’s a bit different that you see in Haskell, Scala, and Rust - what Haskell calls type classes. Rust gives it a veneer of OO syntax, but the semantics themselves are interestingly different.
In particular, the key of type classes is keeping data and behavior separate. The language itself is responsible for automagically passing in the behavior.
So in Scala, you could do something like
def sum[A](values: List[A])(implicit numDict: Num[A]) = values.fold(numDict.+)(numDict.zero)
Or
def sum[A: Num](values: List[A]) = values.fold(_ + _)(zero)
Given a Num typeclass that encapsulates numeric operations. There’s a few important differences:
All of the items of that list have to be the same type of number - they’re all Ints or all Doubles or something
It’s a list of primitive numbers and the implementation is kept separate - no need for boxing and unboxing.
Even if that list is empty, you still have access to the implementation, so you can return a type-appropriate zero value
Generic types can conditionally implement a typeclass. For example, you can make an Eq instance for List[A] if A has an Eq instance. So you can compare List[Int] for equality, but not List[Int => Int].
Three year olds aren’t all that smart, but they learn in a way that ChatGTP 3 and ChatGPT 4 don’t.
A 3 year old will become a 30 year old eventually, but ChatGPT 3 just kinda stays ChatGPT3 forever. LLMs can be trained offline, but we don’t really know if that converges to some theoretical optimum at some point and how far away from the best possible LLM we are.
Exactly.
AI, as a term, was coined in the mid-50s by a computer scientist, John McCarthy. Yes, that John McCarthy, the one who invented LISP and helped develop Algol 60.
It’s been a marketing buzzword for generations, born out of the initial optimism that AI tasks would end up being pretty easy to figure out. AI has primarily referred to narrow AI for decades and decades.
One low hanging fruit thing that comes to mind is that LLMs are terrible at board games like chess, checkers or go.
ChatGPT is a giant cheater.
Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.
The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.
The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.
In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.
C is not how a computer truly works.
If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.
Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.
As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.
Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.
Right tool for the job, sure, but that evolves over time.
Like, years back carpenters didn’t have access to table saws that didn’t have safety features that prevent you from cutting off your fingers by stopping the blade as soon as it touches them. Now we do. Are old table saws still the “right tool for the job”, or are they just a dangerous version of a modern tool that results in needless accidents?
Is C still the right tool for the job in places where Rust is a good option?
Apparently my brain silently inserted “ing with” into the middle of “program functions” a half dozen times without me noticing.
It’s really not just that Rust is new and C is old. Compare Rust with Go, for example. Go is a fairly modern example of a ‘worse is better’ language.
Back in 1970s when C was invented, Lisp had been around for over a decade. C came out the same year as smalltalk, a year before ML, and 3 years before Scheme.
Rust is a very modern language, yes. There’s no way we could have had it in the 70s; many of its language features hadn’t been invented yet. But it very much depends on MIT style research languages for its basis.
I agree with you that if you use functions it’s functional.
But many people don’t really realize how that contrasts with procedures and procedural code.
Functions, here, being the key word.
Functions are pure mappings from input to output.
C is many things, but elegant really isn’t one of them.
C has always been part of the “worse is better”/New Jersey school of thinking. The ultimate goal is simplicity. Particularly simplicity of language implementation, even if that makes programs written in that language more complex or error prone. It’s historically been a very successful approach.
Rust, on the other hand, is part of “The Right Thing”/MIT approach. Simplicity is good, but it’s more important to be correct and complete even if it complicates things a bit.
I don’t really think of void* and ubiquitous nulls, for example, as the hallmark of elegance, but as pretty simple, kludgey solutions.
Rust, on the other hand, brings a lot of really elegant solutions from ML- family languages to a systems language. So you get algebraic data types, pattern matching, non-nullable references by default, closures, typeclasses, expression-oriented syntax, etc.
This is facile.
According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.
Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…
Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.