How the hell do I write stuff? It just comes out, like poop, and the result is usually nearly indistinguishable.
Brad Pitt, in an interview, once said something like: "I don't know what the hell I'm doing up there in front of the camera. Really, I have no f---ing clue." He's become quite an actor, hasn't he? Maybe you've decided he'll never be Bogart (he's got a few years to go, though, doesn't he?), but you have to admit he's a lot better than various actors-who-always-play-themselves whose names rhyme with Rom Ruise.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply even indirectly that I'm a good writer; I know better. Don't ask me how I know — I'd have to think of seven words in the right order to explain it. I just know. I suck.
I do read my old entries occasionally, though, and I think: "Gosh, how the hell do I write that stuff? I could never do that! Well, er, I mean now, that is. Obviously I did it before. Just what are you trying to say, anyway? Do you think I'm some sorta dumbass?"
I wonder.
Dave
I learned to write from my brother Dave, who as far as I can tell wasn't a very good writer. He was a good Liver, to coin an utterly awful phrase; he lived, and that's always better than writing. Writing just tries to show you how people lived, and it never comes close, never gives you that rush of being there just when something wonderful is happening.
Dave died, you know. I've often thought that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be about Dave. He just kinda got sick one day. We golfed, we biked, we had long late-night discussions about his philosophy class, we reminisced about things you could never repeat, during the years we lived in different states, stuff happening mostly at parties, teenager sins you committed as a teenager. Fun stuff. Nothing you didn't do yourself, of course, but it's still unprintable.
He died. I've been dead ever since then, you know. I didn't close my eyes for a single night, for four years after he died, without thinking of offing myself, becaused I missed him so much. My brother Mike knows; my brother Kevin knows; my Dad and Mom both know. We were all there. It's like losing a limb, but worse. So much worse. I realized after Dave died that I'd glady have given both arms and both legs to have him back. I would.
Everyone loved Dave. Everyone wanted to be Dave. Dave had wine-tasting parties at his little apartment; he taught us all to golf and to keep aquariums and to mountain bike and to appreciate the fine points of football strategy. He had a soul-beagle, Bentley, who still misses him to this day.
He had a girlfriend, Nancy, who was more of a wife to him than any wife I know. My wife agrees, and she's only met Nancy once.
Dave just got sick one day. It happens. He didn't feel good. He was coughing. He had night sweats. You know, a cold. A fever. Bronchitis. Something nasty. Didn't want to get anyone else sick — I remember he would sit away from us on the couch so he wouldn't give it to anyone else. He was so considerate.
We didn't know it was a tumor. He was only 23; I mean, come on. He was an all-star football player in high school. You don't get tumors when you're 23.
His doctor mis-diagnosed him, twice. It's OK; we forgive him. It's been 8 years, and I think we all forgive him now. I had a friend in the Navy, back when I was in the Navy, who got mis-diagnosed. It happens. His doctor said he had, I dunno, a cold, something lame. He had leukemia. Doctor mis-diagnosed him twice, just like Dave. With Dave, the doc said it was bronchitis, nasty case, definitely needed bedrest.
The Navy friend got heli-lifted off the sub to a medical facility in Oregon. He didn't make it.
Dave didn't get to ride in a helicopter, but he did get an ambulance. On the 3rd visit to his doctor, the doc took his oxygen level and said: "Ooh, time for the ambulance." Dave trusted him. Turns out Dave had lymphoma, and pretty advanced. No reason. No family history. He just had it. Maybe the environment. Maybe too much coffee or nutra-sweet. Nobody knows. And like everything else in Dave's life, his lymphoma was world-class. It ate him up in a way that no other cancer could.
You really don't want to hear about that part. Trust me.
We trusted Dave. He had a sense of humor like you've never, ever seen or heard before. It would take up several chapters in my book. Dave could make people laugh who had obviously not laughed in years; he'd crack a joke, something made up on the spot, context-sensitive and all, and they'd HAW, HAW, *hack* *cough* HAW HAW HAW until we thought they were going to have a stroke. Dave was the only person I knew who could make someone laugh so hard that I thought they were physically uncomfortable.
So it goes.
I'm not going to make my blog about anything at all. You can peg me as a programming-language guy, or a would-be math guy, or an inconsiderate jerk who says bad things about the vehicle with which you earn your living. But that's not what I'm about. Because I appreciate that you're reading this, I really do, but I'm not writing it for you. I don't know you.
I'm writing for Dave. I sure miss him. We all do. Everyone from Geoworks misses him. They made him a big banner, back when we knew he was sick, but we didn't know it was that bad. I mean, I should have known. The first day in the hospital, after his ambulance trip, after he passed out from lack of oxygen at community college from climbing six flights of stairs from a broken elevator, with a tumor the size of your fist growing between his heart and lungs, and the nurses asked him what he'd been doing that day, and he said he passed out trying to go to class, and he said their eyes got all big and round, I should have known.
Because his doctor started crying. I've never seen that before, and I hope to God I never see it again. She was the visiting doctor, the resident, whatever they have at 10pm at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, Washington, the place Dave spent the next year and a half, the rest of his life. She looked at his chart that first day, and said some encouraging words to him, and then as we were walking down the hall, me and my mom and this strange doctor, she was crying. We thought that was kind of weird, because you don't cry in public, especially if you're a doctor, especially hanging around the family of someone you just saw.
Dave made so many jokes that we couldn't even understand them all, there in the hospital. The nurses loved him. One nurse told him: "You were the best! Even Dr. Wasserman says so!" Dave kidded her for the next four months over that one. "Don't refer to me in the past tense!" I saw her blush every time he mumbled it through the morphine. But he knew and she knew and I knew that he was just messing with her, just having fun on his deathbed. Who else can do that? Not me, I don't think. I don't know.
I remember a road trip, one we did in our parents' van way back when, and our little brother Kevin was about seven years old. Dave taught Kevin to say: "Psh! Whatever!" It took him a little while to grok the concept. The idea was that any time someone said anything you disagreed with, or even if you just felt like it, you would reply: "Psh! Whatever!" You could substitute the socially acceptable variant "Tsk! Whatever!" as long as you could produce a suitably sardonic clicking sound with your tongue, a sound to make Zulu heads turn in envious surprise. Dave had mastered the depreciating tongue-click. For mere mortals, the acceptable default was "Psh!"
My stepmom Mindy was less than pleased. "Kevin, don't you listen to them!"
You wouldn't believe the cheering that me, Mike and Dave produced at 7-year-old Kevin's beautifully crafted response: "Psh, whatever!" (Hi, Min!)
Dave imparted me and everyone near him with a sense of humor, by osmosis, although we were all really just a pale shadow. He had his world-class sense of humor until the very very end. A few months before then, I was visiting him in his hospital room, and he told me in thick, steroid-induced tones (after having thrown up his esophagus the night before, which he recounted to me with some surprise as being like spitting up long filets of salmon) that he'd lost bowel control a few days back, because of the chemotherapy, and he'd had an incident "like the one in Trainspotting". I hadn't seen Trainspotting at the time, but I got the picture. I didn't know what to say, so he chimed in, almost unintelligibly:
"Look on the bright side: at least I didn't have to clean it up!"
How could I laugh? How could I not laugh?
I'll say some pretty strange or seemingly mean things in my time, in my blogs, but you have to keep it all in perspective. My brother was tortured to death. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but aside from the miracle of morphine, those folks in medieval torture chambers had nothing on him. His suffering lasted 18 months, during which he basically dissolved, for all intents and purposes, and in the end I think (not really knowing, myself, but guessing) that the worst part was psychological. Facing your own death at 23 years old is pretty scary. Especially when you're melting.
So I probably have a slightly different perspective than you do. To me, it doesn't matter all that much anymore. I just try to make people around me happy, and enjoy myself, until, you know, I have some sort of major Trainspotting incident. Hopefully one that I don't personally have to clean up.
I don't really mean to be mean, though. I hope you realize that.
Stuff
Despite my best intentions, my blood pressure occasionally rises when I blog. Or more precisely, after I blog, because no bowel movement is ever inspected as scrupulously as the articles posted to Reddit. Even when my blog tries to be innocuous, the comments always seem to get to me.
My doctor says I might have bronchitis. What the hell do they teach med school students, anyway? It's as bad as a Computer Science degree.
I wish there were a way to request, respectfully, that certain of my articles not be posted to Reddit, because even though I want people to read them, I want them to read them at the right time. And that's different for everyone. Probabilistically speaking, the right time for most people is not going to be the day after I post them.
Then of course there's Digg, the Reddit for... Digg people, I guess. Diggers. Duggers. Whatever! Lord help you if you get Dugg, or whatever it is they do over there. And del.icio.us, which in addition to being hard to type is no longer the sprightly young company it once was, ever since You-know-hoo! bought them. Sometimes I wish I could just never be posted there.
That's not nice to the folks looking for karma, though, I guess, so really I just mean this entry, today.
I'd like to blog more about non-technical stuff. I feel like blogging about technical stuff is, well, you know. Dirty? Incestuous? It's not like I'd be saying anything you don't already know, or won't already know at some point, from someone else.
On the other hand, I always feel the (few) bloggers I read ought to stick to the same topics. If I'm reading Bill de hÓra, the only blogger I read regularly, and he suddenly starts talking about his dog, then I feel ripped off, as if the Discovery Channel had started doing a chef competition, or the Food Channel started doing specials on wrestling alligators.
That's not entirely fair of me, I know. People are always broader than what they blog about, but we sort of expect the best bloggers to stay on topic, to keep blogging about whatever we liked last time we read them.
Well, I'm going to take a deep breath, a leap of faith, and see if I can broaden my blogging to include non-cs-technical topics. Yes, some people will whine and moan about it; people will whine and moan about anything and everything. I do it too. But I'd love to blog about the movies I like, and video games, and music, and books, and people, and just plain old good times I've had. Because you never know how long it'll last.
I'd like to ask you, just one person to another, not to post this blog entry to Reddit, Digg or similar. I'd prefer that people learn about my brother Dave through some mechanism other than a newsfeed full of karma modders. You know? So I've deliberately avoided tech topics in this entry, in the hope that it will somehow pass unnoticed.
We'll see.
If not, well... psh! Whatever.
Miss you, Dave.
Rabu, 19 April 2006
Sabtu, 15 April 2006
Software Needs Philosophers
Software needs philosophers.
This thought has been nagging at me for a year now, and recently it's been growing like a tumor. One that plenty of folks on the 'net would love to see kill me.
People don't put much stock in philosophers these days. The popular impression of philosophy is that it's just rhetoric, just frivolous debating about stuff that can never properly be answered. "Spare me the philosophy; let's stick to the facts!"
The funny thing is, it's philosophers who gave us the ability to think rationally, to stick to the facts. If it weren't for the work of countless philosophers, facts would still be getting people tortured and killed for discovering and sharing them.
Does it ever strike you as just a teeny bit odd that after a brief period where philosophy flourished, from maybe 400 B.C.E. to ~100 C.E., we went through a follow-on period of well over one thousand five hundred years during which the Roman Catholic Church enslaved everyone's minds and killed anyone who dared think differently?
What's weirder is that we tend to pretend it didn't really happen. We like to just skip right over the dominance of religion over our minds for a hundred generations, and think of religion today as a kindly old grandpa who's just looking out for us kids. No harm, no foul. Let bygones be bygones. Sure, there were massacres and crusades and genocides and torture chambers with teeth grinding and eyes bleeding and intestines torn out in the name of God. But we were all just kids then, right? Nobody does that kind of thing today, at least not in civilized countries.
We try not to think about the uncivilized ones.
It was philosophers that got us out of that Dark Ages mess, and no small number of them lost their lives in doing so. And today, the philosophy majors are the butts of the most jokes, because after the philosophers succeeded in opening our minds, we forgot why we needed them.
And if we stop to think about it at all, we think that it was other people, people who are very unlike us, who committed those atrocities in the name of Faith (regardless of whether it's faith in a god, or in a political party, or any other form of mind control carried out by force).
We like to think we live in an enlightened age, but we don't. Humans haven't changed significantly in 10,000 years. We're still killing and torturing each other. It's apparently incredibly easy to decide to kill someone and then do it. Happens every day, all around the world. Torture, too.
But those people are just people. If they had been born down the street from you, they'd have gone to school with you, been friends with you, learned to program with you, written blogs and comments, never tortured or killed anyone in the name of an idea. They'd have been you. Which means they are you; you just got lucky in where you were born.
One of the commenters on my last blog entry expressed the fervent wish that I drop dead. To be sure, they qualified it with "on the internet". But if they really feel that way, especially about something as hilariously and absurdly unimportant in the Grand Scheme as whether the Lisp programming language has any acceptable implementations, then what does it say about us?
Everyone who commented angrily on that blog entry was caught. I caught you, anonymous or not, being a religious fanatic. The only "negative" commenter who doesn't appear to be a religious zombie was Paul Costanza (ironic, since he claims to be the opinionated one), who relegated his comments to pedantic technical corrections. They're welcome, of course; I'm always looking to correct any technical misconceptions I harbor. But they're moot, since even if I was wrong about every single technical point I brought up in that entry, my overall point — Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp — remains largely uncontested by the commenters.
Some of them just don't get it, which is fine; no harm in that. If you've been using Lisp for years and years, and you've written books and articles and zillions of lines of Lisp code, then you're unlikely to remember anything about what it's like coming to Lisp for the first time. They're religious because they've forgotten what it's like to be a skeptic.
But make no mistake; a substantial percentage of people who take a side in any programming language discussion that devolves into a flamewar know exactly what the other side means, and they want to invoke the Ultimate Censorship: drop dead! Killing someone, after all, is one of the best ways to silence them. You also have to burn all their writings, which is getting harder these days; hence the increased vehemence on the 'net.
Those of you who've followed what I've written over the past year or so know where I'm going. I'm taking a stand, all right, and it's a very definite one. I'm finding myself drawn inexorably towards a single goal: stamping out technological religion, because I'm frigging tired of not being able to stick to the facts.
FACT: Java has no first-class functions and no macros. This results in warped code that hacks around the problem, and as the code base grows, it takes on a definite, ugly shape, one that's utterly unique to Java. Lisp people can see this clear as day. So can Python folks, so can Ruby folks. Java people flip out, and say "macros are too much power", or "what do u mean i dont understand u" or "fuck you, you jerk, Lisp will NEVER win".
You think I don't hear ALL that, and much more, in the hate mail I get every day?
I sure wouldn't want to be alone with a Java fanatic in a medieval torture chamber, because God only knows what they're capable of.
Turn the mirror towards Python, and what happens? Funny, but the Java folks will mail me saying: "yeah, I've always known I detested Python, and you really nailed exactly why. Thanks!" Meanwhile, Python folks are literally frothing at the mouth, looking for the "Kill That Bastard" key on their 101-key keyboards.
I turned the mirror towards Lisp yesterday. Had to go to the bathroom like nobody's business, and my wife was expecting me home any minute, so I rushed it out: just a few thoughts here and there. So the Gorgon only caught the tiniest glimpse of itself, but hell evidently hath no fury like that of a Lisper scorned, and all that.
It doesn't matter that I rushed it out. I'm glad I did; spending any more time on it, trying to get it "right" by looking up useless factoids like how you can override length's non-polymorphicness with some weird setting (when it plainly should just be the default), would have had the exact same net effect: Lisp zealots would have found some way to turn it into a flamewar. And I'd have been out 2 or 3 more hours.
Let's call it a troll, then, because it was poorly researched; it was just some months-old recollections of pain I'd gone through last year trying to commit to Common Lisp, after another year of trying the same with various flavors of Scheme and finding them all wanting. As far as I'm concerned, Lisp is unacceptable today; it's my opinion and just that, but I'll stick with it.
I still need Lisp; after you learn enough of it, it becomes part of your soul. I get my fix hacking elisp, and I do a lot of it. The commenters are quite right; I've never written anything substantial in Common Lisp, because in each of my serious attempts, there was too much friction. Risk/reward wasn't high enough, and believe me, I wanted it.
But after many attempts, I've given up on Common Lisp. They won't let me use it where I work, and there are probably more Lispers per capita where I work, including some famous ones, than at any other big company in the world. If we can't use it where I work, then it's frigging unacceptable; that's the shortest proof I can offer.
What I'm far more interested today is the situation that arises if you consider my post a troll. I'm far more interested in the social consequences of working in a world filled with religious fanatics of different religious persuasions. Especially given that it's a world in which "natural religion" has, by and large, been marginalized through the work of philosophers.
Let's look at this world in a little more detail, starting with Peter Siebel's comment, which I believe is the most interesting. Peter said:
His first sentence speaks volumes about the sociology. His viewpoint is exactly what they teach us all as kids: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. We like to think people have a right to believe whatever they want, and that it's not nice to say mean things about other people's beliefs, especially when their livelihoods are at stake.
That's where philosophers come in, folks. They pick your beliefs apart and show you in unforgettable ways the consequences of what you believe in. I'm no philosopher; I know basically nothing about it, but I can tell you I wish fervently that some great philosophers would come along and effect change in our technical society.
Because if nothing else, I can see the consequences of the way we're thinking about things. One of many such consequences is that languages aren't getting any better, and the worst offenders are Lisp and Scheme, which by rights should be racing along the innovation curve faster than their supposedly less capable peers. But they've stagnated worse than any other non-dead language I can think of.[1]
Programming languages are religions. For a long while now I've been mildly uncomfortable calling it "religion", but I don't feel bad about it anymore. They're similar enough. At the top of the language religion is the language itself; it serves as the deity and the object of worship.
Like any other organized religion, there's always a Pope (or a politburo chairman, in countries where the government has brutally set itself up as what is for all intents the religion of choice): a spiritual leader that gives the religion the human touch. This person is almost always the language designer, of course. In Lisp's case it's complicated, because McCarthy, Sussman and Steele aren't very active as spiritual leaders for their languages anymore.
Every major organized religion is a heirarchical government, and programming languages are no exception. You'll find equivalents of cardinals, bishops, priests and laity in programming language camps: the closer you are to the fire, to the spiritual center, the higher your rank. It's a great way to quantify your perceived self-importance: a high-score list, in effect. Great for the ego, but it makes you a piss-poor debater, because you're so emotionally invested in your status.
You'd think your rank would be accrued by virtue of your technical and/or documentation contributions, but in practice it's usually more of a function of how many converts you've gained, how many followers you have, how much you've been spreading the Word.
That's why Paul Graham isn't the Pope of Lisp. He's eminently qualified, but unfortunately he's a heretic. Notice that almost none of the commenters on my last blog mentioned the PG argument I made. The only one who did (as of this writing) tried to make it an argument for Common Lisp. Let's face it: you can't give those heretics too much press; people might start listening to them!
Peter, are you beginning to understand why I write so much about something I apparently don't like? It's because I wanted to like it but found it fatally flawed, technically and culturally. It's as if I were a would-be convert to Roman Catholicism, but I can't bring myself to commit because I've seen too much of their role in creating a history that ironically we all wish we could rewrite.
I was born and raised a Roman Catholic, and I renounced it when I was thirteen years old, after my Uncle Frank (a devout terrorist Catholic if there ever was one) told me to stop reading the Bible, that it would "really screw a person up" to do that, that you needed someone to interpret it for you. That wasn't the only reason I renounced it, but it'll suffice for our purposes.
Technologically I was born and raised an assembly-language programmer; at least that's what my first real job was, for 5 years after I got my CS degree. Assembly is just flagellation, though, and damned uncomfortable at that, so I joined the Church of Java for fully seven years. And practically at the very moment I'd finally tired of chafing at Java's limitations, Paul Graham came along and through his early essays, showed me Lisp. What a great new religion!
Problem is, each time you switch religions, the next one has less impact on you. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, they say. I don't know what that means for me, since I was raised by the assembly-language wolf, but it appears to mean that I'm never going to be enthralled with another programming language. And now that I've swallowed the red pill, what choice do I have? I need to try to show people what's out there.
Interestingly, it was Peter Siebel's most excellent book, Practical Common Lisp, that played the role of Uncle Frank and killed my desired to continue with Common Lisp. Peter was the first person to show me beast's underbelly. Every other Lisp book had pretended it was pure and beautiful and uncorrupted, because they left all the nastiness out as "implementation-defined". Once I saw what you really need to do in order to build something resembling a portable Lisp code base, and then had a few runs at it myself, I threw in the towel.
I much prefer Lisp the idea to Lisp the implementation.[2]
I can tell you this: I've tried writing this essay for a year. I've tried fully a dozen times. I've tackled it from a dozen angles. I've wanted to say it — software needs philosophers! — so many times, in so many ways. We need great thinkers — the Fyodor Dostoyevskys and David Humes and Aristotles and Jean-Paul Sartres and Ben Franklins and Galileo Galileis and Bertrand Russells and Albert Einsteins to show us the way through the Software Dark Ages we're in today: a time that will doubtless be remembered as every bit as mired in darkness and ignorance as the Dark Ages themselves.
But I've failed. This isn't the essay I wanted to write, because I'm neither a great thinker nor a great writer. However, you might be: if not now, then perhaps someday. So I think it's better to get the idea out now than to hoard it in the hopes of someday writing a world-changing essay.
For those of you who were surprised at the suddenness and vehemence of the Lisp community's backlash to my little rant, I hope I've helped shed a little light, helped you see its inevitability. Basically they've had a lot of practice. Lisp is one of the oldest technology religions, and they've both experienced and doled out their share of religious persecution.
But that's not the lesson you should take away. The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs.
So keep questioning them.
[1] Yes, I've read all of R6RS. It's a lukewarm compromise that punts on most of the important issues. It's not going to make Scheme any more successful than it is today, which to me feels practically criminal; it was their one big chance to break out of the rut they're in. But it doesn't matter. Let's pretend this footnote is just a troll. If your hackles went up, then you're a techno-religious zombie, and I hope in my lifetime to find you a cure. Try your best to think about that long and hard before responding.
[2] For the record, the commenter I agree the most with is the one who said the problem basically boils down to an IDE issue. SLIME doesn't cut it, either, as beautiful as SLIME is. Can't use it on Windows to save your life, for instance. But that's one of a thousand problems with the Lisp IDE situation; it's pointless to try to discuss them all in blogger. It's probably pointless to discuss them at all, because it's just going to make me more miserable that no decent IDE exists for Lisp, except for Emacs-as-Elisp-IDE. Which is why I get my Lisp fix by hacking elisp these days.
This thought has been nagging at me for a year now, and recently it's been growing like a tumor. One that plenty of folks on the 'net would love to see kill me.
People don't put much stock in philosophers these days. The popular impression of philosophy is that it's just rhetoric, just frivolous debating about stuff that can never properly be answered. "Spare me the philosophy; let's stick to the facts!"
The funny thing is, it's philosophers who gave us the ability to think rationally, to stick to the facts. If it weren't for the work of countless philosophers, facts would still be getting people tortured and killed for discovering and sharing them.
Does it ever strike you as just a teeny bit odd that after a brief period where philosophy flourished, from maybe 400 B.C.E. to ~100 C.E., we went through a follow-on period of well over one thousand five hundred years during which the Roman Catholic Church enslaved everyone's minds and killed anyone who dared think differently?
What's weirder is that we tend to pretend it didn't really happen. We like to just skip right over the dominance of religion over our minds for a hundred generations, and think of religion today as a kindly old grandpa who's just looking out for us kids. No harm, no foul. Let bygones be bygones. Sure, there were massacres and crusades and genocides and torture chambers with teeth grinding and eyes bleeding and intestines torn out in the name of God. But we were all just kids then, right? Nobody does that kind of thing today, at least not in civilized countries.
We try not to think about the uncivilized ones.
It was philosophers that got us out of that Dark Ages mess, and no small number of them lost their lives in doing so. And today, the philosophy majors are the butts of the most jokes, because after the philosophers succeeded in opening our minds, we forgot why we needed them.
And if we stop to think about it at all, we think that it was other people, people who are very unlike us, who committed those atrocities in the name of Faith (regardless of whether it's faith in a god, or in a political party, or any other form of mind control carried out by force).
We like to think we live in an enlightened age, but we don't. Humans haven't changed significantly in 10,000 years. We're still killing and torturing each other. It's apparently incredibly easy to decide to kill someone and then do it. Happens every day, all around the world. Torture, too.
But those people are just people. If they had been born down the street from you, they'd have gone to school with you, been friends with you, learned to program with you, written blogs and comments, never tortured or killed anyone in the name of an idea. They'd have been you. Which means they are you; you just got lucky in where you were born.
One of the commenters on my last blog entry expressed the fervent wish that I drop dead. To be sure, they qualified it with "on the internet". But if they really feel that way, especially about something as hilariously and absurdly unimportant in the Grand Scheme as whether the Lisp programming language has any acceptable implementations, then what does it say about us?
Everyone who commented angrily on that blog entry was caught. I caught you, anonymous or not, being a religious fanatic. The only "negative" commenter who doesn't appear to be a religious zombie was Paul Costanza (ironic, since he claims to be the opinionated one), who relegated his comments to pedantic technical corrections. They're welcome, of course; I'm always looking to correct any technical misconceptions I harbor. But they're moot, since even if I was wrong about every single technical point I brought up in that entry, my overall point — Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp — remains largely uncontested by the commenters.
Some of them just don't get it, which is fine; no harm in that. If you've been using Lisp for years and years, and you've written books and articles and zillions of lines of Lisp code, then you're unlikely to remember anything about what it's like coming to Lisp for the first time. They're religious because they've forgotten what it's like to be a skeptic.
But make no mistake; a substantial percentage of people who take a side in any programming language discussion that devolves into a flamewar know exactly what the other side means, and they want to invoke the Ultimate Censorship: drop dead! Killing someone, after all, is one of the best ways to silence them. You also have to burn all their writings, which is getting harder these days; hence the increased vehemence on the 'net.
Those of you who've followed what I've written over the past year or so know where I'm going. I'm taking a stand, all right, and it's a very definite one. I'm finding myself drawn inexorably towards a single goal: stamping out technological religion, because I'm frigging tired of not being able to stick to the facts.
FACT: Java has no first-class functions and no macros. This results in warped code that hacks around the problem, and as the code base grows, it takes on a definite, ugly shape, one that's utterly unique to Java. Lisp people can see this clear as day. So can Python folks, so can Ruby folks. Java people flip out, and say "macros are too much power", or "what do u mean i dont understand u" or "fuck you, you jerk, Lisp will NEVER win".
You think I don't hear ALL that, and much more, in the hate mail I get every day?
I sure wouldn't want to be alone with a Java fanatic in a medieval torture chamber, because God only knows what they're capable of.
Turn the mirror towards Python, and what happens? Funny, but the Java folks will mail me saying: "yeah, I've always known I detested Python, and you really nailed exactly why. Thanks!" Meanwhile, Python folks are literally frothing at the mouth, looking for the "Kill That Bastard" key on their 101-key keyboards.
I turned the mirror towards Lisp yesterday. Had to go to the bathroom like nobody's business, and my wife was expecting me home any minute, so I rushed it out: just a few thoughts here and there. So the Gorgon only caught the tiniest glimpse of itself, but hell evidently hath no fury like that of a Lisper scorned, and all that.
It doesn't matter that I rushed it out. I'm glad I did; spending any more time on it, trying to get it "right" by looking up useless factoids like how you can override length's non-polymorphicness with some weird setting (when it plainly should just be the default), would have had the exact same net effect: Lisp zealots would have found some way to turn it into a flamewar. And I'd have been out 2 or 3 more hours.
Let's call it a troll, then, because it was poorly researched; it was just some months-old recollections of pain I'd gone through last year trying to commit to Common Lisp, after another year of trying the same with various flavors of Scheme and finding them all wanting. As far as I'm concerned, Lisp is unacceptable today; it's my opinion and just that, but I'll stick with it.
I still need Lisp; after you learn enough of it, it becomes part of your soul. I get my fix hacking elisp, and I do a lot of it. The commenters are quite right; I've never written anything substantial in Common Lisp, because in each of my serious attempts, there was too much friction. Risk/reward wasn't high enough, and believe me, I wanted it.
But after many attempts, I've given up on Common Lisp. They won't let me use it where I work, and there are probably more Lispers per capita where I work, including some famous ones, than at any other big company in the world. If we can't use it where I work, then it's frigging unacceptable; that's the shortest proof I can offer.
What I'm far more interested today is the situation that arises if you consider my post a troll. I'm far more interested in the social consequences of working in a world filled with religious fanatics of different religious persuasions. Especially given that it's a world in which "natural religion" has, by and large, been marginalized through the work of philosophers.
Let's look at this world in a little more detail, starting with Peter Siebel's comment, which I believe is the most interesting. Peter said:
I was trying to figure out why on earth you spent so much time writing about something that you apparently don't like. Then it hit me: HCGS. So thanks for your help.
His first sentence speaks volumes about the sociology. His viewpoint is exactly what they teach us all as kids: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. We like to think people have a right to believe whatever they want, and that it's not nice to say mean things about other people's beliefs, especially when their livelihoods are at stake.
That's where philosophers come in, folks. They pick your beliefs apart and show you in unforgettable ways the consequences of what you believe in. I'm no philosopher; I know basically nothing about it, but I can tell you I wish fervently that some great philosophers would come along and effect change in our technical society.
Because if nothing else, I can see the consequences of the way we're thinking about things. One of many such consequences is that languages aren't getting any better, and the worst offenders are Lisp and Scheme, which by rights should be racing along the innovation curve faster than their supposedly less capable peers. But they've stagnated worse than any other non-dead language I can think of.[1]
Programming languages are religions. For a long while now I've been mildly uncomfortable calling it "religion", but I don't feel bad about it anymore. They're similar enough. At the top of the language religion is the language itself; it serves as the deity and the object of worship.
Like any other organized religion, there's always a Pope (or a politburo chairman, in countries where the government has brutally set itself up as what is for all intents the religion of choice): a spiritual leader that gives the religion the human touch. This person is almost always the language designer, of course. In Lisp's case it's complicated, because McCarthy, Sussman and Steele aren't very active as spiritual leaders for their languages anymore.
Every major organized religion is a heirarchical government, and programming languages are no exception. You'll find equivalents of cardinals, bishops, priests and laity in programming language camps: the closer you are to the fire, to the spiritual center, the higher your rank. It's a great way to quantify your perceived self-importance: a high-score list, in effect. Great for the ego, but it makes you a piss-poor debater, because you're so emotionally invested in your status.
You'd think your rank would be accrued by virtue of your technical and/or documentation contributions, but in practice it's usually more of a function of how many converts you've gained, how many followers you have, how much you've been spreading the Word.
That's why Paul Graham isn't the Pope of Lisp. He's eminently qualified, but unfortunately he's a heretic. Notice that almost none of the commenters on my last blog mentioned the PG argument I made. The only one who did (as of this writing) tried to make it an argument for Common Lisp. Let's face it: you can't give those heretics too much press; people might start listening to them!
Peter, are you beginning to understand why I write so much about something I apparently don't like? It's because I wanted to like it but found it fatally flawed, technically and culturally. It's as if I were a would-be convert to Roman Catholicism, but I can't bring myself to commit because I've seen too much of their role in creating a history that ironically we all wish we could rewrite.
I was born and raised a Roman Catholic, and I renounced it when I was thirteen years old, after my Uncle Frank (a devout terrorist Catholic if there ever was one) told me to stop reading the Bible, that it would "really screw a person up" to do that, that you needed someone to interpret it for you. That wasn't the only reason I renounced it, but it'll suffice for our purposes.
Technologically I was born and raised an assembly-language programmer; at least that's what my first real job was, for 5 years after I got my CS degree. Assembly is just flagellation, though, and damned uncomfortable at that, so I joined the Church of Java for fully seven years. And practically at the very moment I'd finally tired of chafing at Java's limitations, Paul Graham came along and through his early essays, showed me Lisp. What a great new religion!
Problem is, each time you switch religions, the next one has less impact on you. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, they say. I don't know what that means for me, since I was raised by the assembly-language wolf, but it appears to mean that I'm never going to be enthralled with another programming language. And now that I've swallowed the red pill, what choice do I have? I need to try to show people what's out there.
Interestingly, it was Peter Siebel's most excellent book, Practical Common Lisp, that played the role of Uncle Frank and killed my desired to continue with Common Lisp. Peter was the first person to show me beast's underbelly. Every other Lisp book had pretended it was pure and beautiful and uncorrupted, because they left all the nastiness out as "implementation-defined". Once I saw what you really need to do in order to build something resembling a portable Lisp code base, and then had a few runs at it myself, I threw in the towel.
I much prefer Lisp the idea to Lisp the implementation.[2]
I can tell you this: I've tried writing this essay for a year. I've tried fully a dozen times. I've tackled it from a dozen angles. I've wanted to say it — software needs philosophers! — so many times, in so many ways. We need great thinkers — the Fyodor Dostoyevskys and David Humes and Aristotles and Jean-Paul Sartres and Ben Franklins and Galileo Galileis and Bertrand Russells and Albert Einsteins to show us the way through the Software Dark Ages we're in today: a time that will doubtless be remembered as every bit as mired in darkness and ignorance as the Dark Ages themselves.
But I've failed. This isn't the essay I wanted to write, because I'm neither a great thinker nor a great writer. However, you might be: if not now, then perhaps someday. So I think it's better to get the idea out now than to hoard it in the hopes of someday writing a world-changing essay.
For those of you who were surprised at the suddenness and vehemence of the Lisp community's backlash to my little rant, I hope I've helped shed a little light, helped you see its inevitability. Basically they've had a lot of practice. Lisp is one of the oldest technology religions, and they've both experienced and doled out their share of religious persecution.
But that's not the lesson you should take away. The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs.
So keep questioning them.
[1] Yes, I've read all of R6RS. It's a lukewarm compromise that punts on most of the important issues. It's not going to make Scheme any more successful than it is today, which to me feels practically criminal; it was their one big chance to break out of the rut they're in. But it doesn't matter. Let's pretend this footnote is just a troll. If your hackles went up, then you're a techno-religious zombie, and I hope in my lifetime to find you a cure. Try your best to think about that long and hard before responding.
[2] For the record, the commenter I agree the most with is the one who said the problem basically boils down to an IDE issue. SLIME doesn't cut it, either, as beautiful as SLIME is. Can't use it on Windows to save your life, for instance. But that's one of a thousand problems with the Lisp IDE situation; it's pointless to try to discuss them all in blogger. It's probably pointless to discuss them at all, because it's just going to make me more miserable that no decent IDE exists for Lisp, except for Emacs-as-Elisp-IDE. Which is why I get my Lisp fix by hacking elisp these days.
Jumat, 14 April 2006
Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp
It's been over four months since Eric Kidd posted his infamous Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP article. You know, the one that got approximately 6.02e23 comments, ranging from "I agree!" through "I hate you!" to "I bred them together to create a monster!" Any time the comment thread becomes huge enough to exhibit emergent behavior, up to and including spawning new species of monsters, you know you've touched a nerve.
What amazes me is that nobody's pointed out the obvious counter-observation: Lisp is not an acceptable LISP. Not for any value of Lisp. There's nothing magical about this, nothing partisan. If Lisp were acceptable, then we'd all be using it.
You've all read about the Road to Lisp. I was on it for a little over a year. It's a great road, very enlightening, blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that Lisp isn't the at the end of it. Lisp is just the last semi-civilized outpost you hit before it turns into a dirt road, one that leads into the godawful swamp most of us spend our programming careers slugging around in. I guarantee you there isn't one single Lisp programmer out there who uses exclusively Lisp. Instead we spend our time hacking around its inadequacies, often in other languages.
So for four months I've been waiting for someone else to say it, but so far it's not happening. Why aren't we admitting it?
Oh, right. Religion. I keep forgetting about that.
Lisp programmers are just like all other programmers: they want to write code and get cool stuff done, which presupposes they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need. There's all this real-life stuff (jobs, family, stability, all the usual suspects) intruding on you as a programmer, demanding that you quit dorking around looking for the One True Language, and settle down on whatever barren rock you happen to be squatting on at the moment, and call it Good. So most Lisp programmers — and that's not many, since not many programmers make it even close to that far down the Road — see that last outpost of technical civilization, peer balefully into the swamp, and decide to check into the Lisp hotel for good. Not realizing, of course, that all its rooms are in the swamp proper.
We all know it's tricky to have a rational discussion about a religion. Non-Lispers will be able to read this without getting their feathers ruffled. Some Lispers aren't too far gone, so let's assume we're talking to them, and take a look at some of Lisp's problems that make it flat-out unacceptable. At least for LISP, you know, the idealized one.
Problem 1: Which Lisp?
Sorry, folks, but you can't trivialize this one. Let's say I'm a new would-be Lisper, just finished walking down that long damn Road, and now that I'm here, I'm ready to start using it. Which "it" should I use? The answer is "it depends", and that's pretty unfortunate, because right there you've just lost users. With Python or Ruby or Java, you've only got one language to choose from. Or at least you can be comfortable that there's a single canonical version, and the rest (e.g. Jython) are highly experimental territory.
Pick Scheme, and you have to pick a Scheme. Pick Common Lisp, and you have to pick a Common Lisp. Heck, there are even two or three flavors of Emacs-Lisp out there.
Most newcomers eventually (and independently) decide the same thing: Scheme is a better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work. CL has more libraries, and the implementations are somewhat more compatible than Scheme implementations, particularly with respect to macros. So newcomers heave a deep sigh, and they learn to accept LISP-2, names like rplaca, case-insensitivity, '(ALL CAPS OUTPUT), and all the other zillions of idiosyncracies of a standard Common Lisp implementation. Eventually, if they stick with Lisp at all, they learn they can override most of these defaults in nonportable ways, which makes things infinitesimally more bearable.
Whatever. If you're a Lisper, you dealt with all this crap years ago, and now you're committed. If you're not a Lisper, then you're not very likely to become one any time soon. In fact your probability of learning Lisp is decreasing over time, as other languages continue to close the gap in the Lispy areas, and simultaneously increase their lead in non-Lispy areas where Lisp is making little (if any) progress.
Let's look at some of those areas. But first, let me mention one last problem in the "which Lisp" space. It's dirty laundry that needs airing. The problem: Paul Graham. I mean, the guy's a genius, and I love reading his essays, and his startups are doing great things, etc. etc. You can't fault him. But he's created something of a problem.
Before Paul Graham, Lisp was dying. It really was, and let's not get all sentimental or anything; it's just common sense. A language is always either gaining or losing ground, and Lisp was losing ground all through the 1990s. Then PG came along with his "I'm not talking to you if you're over 26 years old" essays, each a giant slap in our collective face, and everyone sat up and paid attention to him in a hurry. And a TON of people started looking very seriously at Lisp.
Lisp might or might not have experienced a revival without Paul's essays, but it's moot: he showed up, and Lisp got real popular, real fast. And then he said: "Don't use it!" Sort of. I mean, that's effectively what he said, isn't it? By deciding to pre-announce Arc, he Microsofted Lisp. Killed it with vaporware. It's a great strategy when you're an evil empire. I don't think that's exactly what Paul had in mind, but let's face it: that's what happened.
So Common Lispers grumble about Paul in the hallways. If I read newsgroups (every time I try, the overall ugliness of humanity drives me away within hours; I only re-attempt it every decade or so) I see them grumbling there too. He's put them in a tough spot, because he did use Common Lisp for Viaweb, and his arguments in favor of Lisp (in the general sense) have been compelling enough to bring in newcomers by the droves. But he's not throwing his weight behind CL. He's not even taking the marginally-acceptable route (from a damage-control perspective) of recommending Scheme. Instead, Paul's (*gasp*) starting a new religion.
Arc's going to be a new religion, of course, because programmers just haaaaaave to make it that way. If it ever appears, anyway. But will it? That's the tricky thing about Cathedral-style software; you never can tell. My prediction: someone will get tired of waiting, and they'll Torvalds Arc into obsolescence before it's ever released. (If you don't get the reference, it's what Linux did to GNU Hurd).
Long story short: nobody knows what the hell Lisp they're supposed to be using, and it's absolutely killing adoption.
Problem 2: Worthless Spec
Oh, ouch, did I have to put it quite like that? I mean, c'mon, let's be fair, there are literally hundreds of people out there who disagree.
Unfortunately, the simple fact is that the spec is ancient. Every time someone talks about updating it, someone screams about time or money or whatever. The problem is (like the problem with RSS) a people-problem, not a time or money problem. This is absolutely true in the Scheme world, too. There are a bunch of old-timer stakeholders who want to have their say. So you're basically asking a goverment (complete with lobbyists, political parties, the works) to design Lisp if you go that route. The naysayers are right about one thing: it'll never happen.
Your only other option is to design a new language, and you won't get any help from Lisp people, because they will hate you. They love pointing to the trail of bodies left in the wake of every pioneer who's tried this before, none of whom has emerged with a "successful" Lisp. Of course, they haven't been successful because Lispers didn't want to have anything to do with them; Lispers are just as incapacitated by their techno-religious beliefs as folks from other languages. Religions dislike each other, but no heretic is as damned as someone who starts with your religion and makes a modification to it. Just ask the Albigensians, for instance.
But what's wrong with Common Lisp? Do I really need to say it? Every single non-standard extension, everything not in the spec, is "wrong" with Common Lisp. This includes any support for threads, filesystem access, processes and IPC, operating system interoperability, a GUI, Unicode, and the long list of other features missing from the latest hyperspec.
Effectively, everything that can't be solved from within Lisp is a target. Lisp is really powerful, sure, but some features can only be effective if they're handled by the implementation.
Problem 3: CLOS
Note: this section contains a few factual errors pointed out by Pascal Costanza in a comment below. Some of his corrections are also, of course, opinions, and I've commented on them later in the thread. In any case, while I thank Pascal for his corrections, the errors I've made are utterly irrelevant to my conclusions.
CLOS is icky. I haven't worked with Smalltalk a whole lot, but I've worked with it enough to know that to do OOP right, you have to do it from the ground up. CLOS was bolted on to Common Lisp. Everyone knows it, although not many people want to admit it.
It was bolted on very nicely, and it's not my intention to disparage the efforts of the people who created it. It was an amazing piece of work, and it did a great job of being flexible enough to tie together the conflicting OO systems of existing Lisp implementations.
But let's face it; CLOS has problems. One obvious one is that
Another problem is the slot accessor macros. They're insanely clever, but clever isn't what you want. You want first-class function access, so you can pass the getters and setters to
What you really want in lieu of CLOS is... complicated. It's a hard problem. Lisp wants to be constructed entirely from macros. It's part of the purity of the idea of LISP: you only need the seven (or is it five?) primitives to build the full machine. Doing CLOS as a bunch of macros was very much in the spirit of Lisp: it was a Lispy thing to do.
But macros are a problem. Yes, they're one of the most important differentiators. But macros are like having these high-powered band-aids, when what you want is not to be wounded in the first place. Having the object system — something pretty fundamental to the language, you'd think — written as a bunch of macros doesn't feel right when all is said and done.
When you work with Ruby or Smalltalk or any suitably "pure" OO language (Python doesn't quite count, unfortunately; its bolts are also showing), you realize there are some distinct advantages to having everything be an object. It's very nice, for instance, to be able to figure out what methods are applicable to a given class (e.g.
Of course, that forces you into a single-dispatch model, so it becomes harder to figure out what to do about multi-methods. Some Python folks have implemented multi-methods for Python, and they do it by making them top-level functions, which makes sense (where else would you put them?) I'm not claiming that Smalltalk's object model is going to translate straight to Lisp; you have to decide whether cons cells are "objects", for instance, and that's a decision I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I don't envy the person who tackles it.
Regardless of what the solution might be, CLOS remains a problem. It's over-complicated and yet not quite OOP-y enough or expressive enough. The problem of reflecting on an object to see which methods are valid for it is one example, but there are tons of others. Heck, one possibly valid complaint is that it doesn't work very much like the "conventional" OOP systems of C++, Java, Python and Ruby. There's no real reason it shouldn't be more like them. But changing CLOS to be simpler and more seamless essentially means replacing it. And replacing it is probably best done inside the implementation.
In other words, any fix means starting virtually from scratch.
Or maybe you could go the Haskell route and not have OOP at all. That seems to alienate most programmers, though, despite the attractions of not having to create nouns for everything. (Have you ever noticed that turning a non-object-oriented program into an object-oriented one in the same language that does the same thing essentially doubles its size? Try it sometime...) At the risk of predicting future fashion trends, which is rarely a good idea, I'll venture that objects are going to continue to be trendy for at least a few more decades. So I think Lisp needs some form of "seamless" OOP.
Problem 4: Macros
Macros are one of the worst problems with Lisp, or at least they're one of the biggest unsolved problems.
Yes, they're amazingly powerful and critically important and blah Blah BLAH. You can read all about them elsewhere. Paul Graham's On Lisp is the best reference I've found.
But they're fraught with problems. One is that they're not hygienic. You should at least have the option of requesting hygienic macros. Various papers have been published, and implementations implemented, for hygienic
For that matter, you should also have a choice between Scheme-style pattern-matching macros and Lisp-style code-style macros. They're very different, and each kind is better (cleaner) in some situations. People often act as if hygiene is synonymous with define-syntax, but the pattern-template style is orthogonal to the question of hygiene.
Style considerations aside, macros have tool problems. Macros are notoriously hard to debug, and honestly it needn't be that way. If your editor knows all about macros, then you should be able to click to see the expansion, and click again to see its sub-expansions, all the way down to the primitive functions. Some editors can do this, but none of them (that I'm aware of) handle macros as cleanly or seamlessly as they do normal functions.
Syntax in general is a problem. Lisp has a little syntax, and it shows up occasionally as, for instance, '(foo) being expanded as (quote foo), usually when you least expect it. Truth be told, Lisp should probably have a skinnable syntax. That implies a canonical abstract syntax tree, which of course hasn't been defined (and in many implementations isn't even available to you, the way it is in the Io language, say). Once you've got a canonical AST defined, syntax should, in theory, be like CSS chrome. Of course, there are plenty of bodies left in the trail of this particular theory as well. Someday...
In any case, because macros are rarely supported "well enough" by the tools, and because they're not first-class functions, and so on, they wind up being second-class citizens. The rule "you should only use a macro when nothing else will do" implies that they really are a last resort, which (to me) is synonymous with band-aid. Yes, it's wonderful that you have the band-aid — or maybe duct tape is a better analogy — certainly you miss them dearly when you're working in other languages. But you don't want to have to build your entire object system with duct tape.
So macros, like the object system, need to be re-thought from the ground up. There's undoubtedly enough research in the space that someone could throw together a working definition in no time, something just good enough for today's programmers, the ones who expect (and rightfully so, I might add) to be able to name their methods "length" without getting a compiler error.
Problem 4: Type System
See, that's just exactly the problem with type systems. They can make sure you use headings, but they can't ensure you get the numbering right.
Well, it'll take me forever to talk about this one, so I'll have to leave it for another blog. The problem is that the type system has to be extensible and skinnable, and I'm not strictly talking about user-defined types in the sense of OOP or CLOS. Unfortunately it really is a huge open issue, one that'll take longer than this blog to sort through, so I'll have to leave it for today.
Lisp, for all the strengths of its flexible type system, hasn't got this issue right either. Otherwise Haskell and OCaml (and C++, gack) wouldn't be kicking its ass all over the performance map. 'nuff said, at least for now. [And no, they don't quite have it right either.]
I promise I'll talk about type systems soon. But I also promised some friends I'd make my blogs shorter.
There is no acceptable Lisp
This is a problem. It's not a little teeny one, either. The Lisp communities (yeah, there are a bunch) are going to have to realize that if Lisp is ever going to be massively successful, it needs an overhaul. Or maybe a revolution. Contrary to what some might tell you, it doesn't need a committee, and it doesn't need a bunch of money. Linux proved exactly the opposite. Lisp needs a benevolent dictator. Lisp needs to ditch the name "Lisp", since it scares people. And Lisp needs to learn from the lessons of the 45 years of languages that have followed it.
And no, I'm not the guy. You're all far more qualified to tackle this problem than I am. Especially if you're under 26.
What amazes me is that nobody's pointed out the obvious counter-observation: Lisp is not an acceptable LISP. Not for any value of Lisp. There's nothing magical about this, nothing partisan. If Lisp were acceptable, then we'd all be using it.
You've all read about the Road to Lisp. I was on it for a little over a year. It's a great road, very enlightening, blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that Lisp isn't the at the end of it. Lisp is just the last semi-civilized outpost you hit before it turns into a dirt road, one that leads into the godawful swamp most of us spend our programming careers slugging around in. I guarantee you there isn't one single Lisp programmer out there who uses exclusively Lisp. Instead we spend our time hacking around its inadequacies, often in other languages.
So for four months I've been waiting for someone else to say it, but so far it's not happening. Why aren't we admitting it?
Oh, right. Religion. I keep forgetting about that.
Lisp programmers are just like all other programmers: they want to write code and get cool stuff done, which presupposes they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need. There's all this real-life stuff (jobs, family, stability, all the usual suspects) intruding on you as a programmer, demanding that you quit dorking around looking for the One True Language, and settle down on whatever barren rock you happen to be squatting on at the moment, and call it Good. So most Lisp programmers — and that's not many, since not many programmers make it even close to that far down the Road — see that last outpost of technical civilization, peer balefully into the swamp, and decide to check into the Lisp hotel for good. Not realizing, of course, that all its rooms are in the swamp proper.
We all know it's tricky to have a rational discussion about a religion. Non-Lispers will be able to read this without getting their feathers ruffled. Some Lispers aren't too far gone, so let's assume we're talking to them, and take a look at some of Lisp's problems that make it flat-out unacceptable. At least for LISP, you know, the idealized one.
Problem 1: Which Lisp?
Sorry, folks, but you can't trivialize this one. Let's say I'm a new would-be Lisper, just finished walking down that long damn Road, and now that I'm here, I'm ready to start using it. Which "it" should I use? The answer is "it depends", and that's pretty unfortunate, because right there you've just lost users. With Python or Ruby or Java, you've only got one language to choose from. Or at least you can be comfortable that there's a single canonical version, and the rest (e.g. Jython) are highly experimental territory.
Pick Scheme, and you have to pick a Scheme. Pick Common Lisp, and you have to pick a Common Lisp. Heck, there are even two or three flavors of Emacs-Lisp out there.
Most newcomers eventually (and independently) decide the same thing: Scheme is a better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work. CL has more libraries, and the implementations are somewhat more compatible than Scheme implementations, particularly with respect to macros. So newcomers heave a deep sigh, and they learn to accept LISP-2, names like rplaca, case-insensitivity, '(ALL CAPS OUTPUT), and all the other zillions of idiosyncracies of a standard Common Lisp implementation. Eventually, if they stick with Lisp at all, they learn they can override most of these defaults in nonportable ways, which makes things infinitesimally more bearable.
Whatever. If you're a Lisper, you dealt with all this crap years ago, and now you're committed. If you're not a Lisper, then you're not very likely to become one any time soon. In fact your probability of learning Lisp is decreasing over time, as other languages continue to close the gap in the Lispy areas, and simultaneously increase their lead in non-Lispy areas where Lisp is making little (if any) progress.
Let's look at some of those areas. But first, let me mention one last problem in the "which Lisp" space. It's dirty laundry that needs airing. The problem: Paul Graham. I mean, the guy's a genius, and I love reading his essays, and his startups are doing great things, etc. etc. You can't fault him. But he's created something of a problem.
Before Paul Graham, Lisp was dying. It really was, and let's not get all sentimental or anything; it's just common sense. A language is always either gaining or losing ground, and Lisp was losing ground all through the 1990s. Then PG came along with his "I'm not talking to you if you're over 26 years old" essays, each a giant slap in our collective face, and everyone sat up and paid attention to him in a hurry. And a TON of people started looking very seriously at Lisp.
Lisp might or might not have experienced a revival without Paul's essays, but it's moot: he showed up, and Lisp got real popular, real fast. And then he said: "Don't use it!" Sort of. I mean, that's effectively what he said, isn't it? By deciding to pre-announce Arc, he Microsofted Lisp. Killed it with vaporware. It's a great strategy when you're an evil empire. I don't think that's exactly what Paul had in mind, but let's face it: that's what happened.
So Common Lispers grumble about Paul in the hallways. If I read newsgroups (every time I try, the overall ugliness of humanity drives me away within hours; I only re-attempt it every decade or so) I see them grumbling there too. He's put them in a tough spot, because he did use Common Lisp for Viaweb, and his arguments in favor of Lisp (in the general sense) have been compelling enough to bring in newcomers by the droves. But he's not throwing his weight behind CL. He's not even taking the marginally-acceptable route (from a damage-control perspective) of recommending Scheme. Instead, Paul's (*gasp*) starting a new religion.
Arc's going to be a new religion, of course, because programmers just haaaaaave to make it that way. If it ever appears, anyway. But will it? That's the tricky thing about Cathedral-style software; you never can tell. My prediction: someone will get tired of waiting, and they'll Torvalds Arc into obsolescence before it's ever released. (If you don't get the reference, it's what Linux did to GNU Hurd).
Long story short: nobody knows what the hell Lisp they're supposed to be using, and it's absolutely killing adoption.
Problem 2: Worthless Spec
Oh, ouch, did I have to put it quite like that? I mean, c'mon, let's be fair, there are literally hundreds of people out there who disagree.
Unfortunately, the simple fact is that the spec is ancient. Every time someone talks about updating it, someone screams about time or money or whatever. The problem is (like the problem with RSS) a people-problem, not a time or money problem. This is absolutely true in the Scheme world, too. There are a bunch of old-timer stakeholders who want to have their say. So you're basically asking a goverment (complete with lobbyists, political parties, the works) to design Lisp if you go that route. The naysayers are right about one thing: it'll never happen.
Your only other option is to design a new language, and you won't get any help from Lisp people, because they will hate you. They love pointing to the trail of bodies left in the wake of every pioneer who's tried this before, none of whom has emerged with a "successful" Lisp. Of course, they haven't been successful because Lispers didn't want to have anything to do with them; Lispers are just as incapacitated by their techno-religious beliefs as folks from other languages. Religions dislike each other, but no heretic is as damned as someone who starts with your religion and makes a modification to it. Just ask the Albigensians, for instance.
But what's wrong with Common Lisp? Do I really need to say it? Every single non-standard extension, everything not in the spec, is "wrong" with Common Lisp. This includes any support for threads, filesystem access, processes and IPC, operating system interoperability, a GUI, Unicode, and the long list of other features missing from the latest hyperspec.
Effectively, everything that can't be solved from within Lisp is a target. Lisp is really powerful, sure, but some features can only be effective if they're handled by the implementation.
Problem 3: CLOS
Note: this section contains a few factual errors pointed out by Pascal Costanza in a comment below. Some of his corrections are also, of course, opinions, and I've commented on them later in the thread. In any case, while I thank Pascal for his corrections, the errors I've made are utterly irrelevant to my conclusions.
CLOS is icky. I haven't worked with Smalltalk a whole lot, but I've worked with it enough to know that to do OOP right, you have to do it from the ground up. CLOS was bolted on to Common Lisp. Everyone knows it, although not many people want to admit it.
It was bolted on very nicely, and it's not my intention to disparage the efforts of the people who created it. It was an amazing piece of work, and it did a great job of being flexible enough to tie together the conflicting OO systems of existing Lisp implementations.
But let's face it; CLOS has problems. One obvious one is that
length isn't a polymorphic function. It's one of the first speed bumps you encounter. You can't create a new kind of measurable object and give it a length method; you have to call it rope-length or foo-length or whatever. That's part of Lisp's endoskeleton showing; you can see the bolt sticking out plain as the nose on your face. It's not seamless; it's not orthogonal, and it's not the Right Thing. But it's not going to change, either.Another problem is the slot accessor macros. They're insanely clever, but clever isn't what you want. You want first-class function access, so you can pass the getters and setters to
map, find-if, etc. You can work around these things, but they're a leaky abstraction, and enough of those will add up to significant mental resistance to getting things done. It's like all those weird little rules in Perl: non-orthogonal rules that add up to forgetting the language every time you leave it alone for more than a week.What you really want in lieu of CLOS is... complicated. It's a hard problem. Lisp wants to be constructed entirely from macros. It's part of the purity of the idea of LISP: you only need the seven (or is it five?) primitives to build the full machine. Doing CLOS as a bunch of macros was very much in the spirit of Lisp: it was a Lispy thing to do.
But macros are a problem. Yes, they're one of the most important differentiators. But macros are like having these high-powered band-aids, when what you want is not to be wounded in the first place. Having the object system — something pretty fundamental to the language, you'd think — written as a bunch of macros doesn't feel right when all is said and done.
When you work with Ruby or Smalltalk or any suitably "pure" OO language (Python doesn't quite count, unfortunately; its bolts are also showing), you realize there are some distinct advantages to having everything be an object. It's very nice, for instance, to be able to figure out what methods are applicable to a given class (e.g.
"foo".methods.sort.grep(/!/) from Ruby), and to be able to extend that list with your own new methods. It's a nice organizational technique.Of course, that forces you into a single-dispatch model, so it becomes harder to figure out what to do about multi-methods. Some Python folks have implemented multi-methods for Python, and they do it by making them top-level functions, which makes sense (where else would you put them?) I'm not claiming that Smalltalk's object model is going to translate straight to Lisp; you have to decide whether cons cells are "objects", for instance, and that's a decision I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I don't envy the person who tackles it.
Regardless of what the solution might be, CLOS remains a problem. It's over-complicated and yet not quite OOP-y enough or expressive enough. The problem of reflecting on an object to see which methods are valid for it is one example, but there are tons of others. Heck, one possibly valid complaint is that it doesn't work very much like the "conventional" OOP systems of C++, Java, Python and Ruby. There's no real reason it shouldn't be more like them. But changing CLOS to be simpler and more seamless essentially means replacing it. And replacing it is probably best done inside the implementation.
In other words, any fix means starting virtually from scratch.
Or maybe you could go the Haskell route and not have OOP at all. That seems to alienate most programmers, though, despite the attractions of not having to create nouns for everything. (Have you ever noticed that turning a non-object-oriented program into an object-oriented one in the same language that does the same thing essentially doubles its size? Try it sometime...) At the risk of predicting future fashion trends, which is rarely a good idea, I'll venture that objects are going to continue to be trendy for at least a few more decades. So I think Lisp needs some form of "seamless" OOP.
Problem 4: Macros
Macros are one of the worst problems with Lisp, or at least they're one of the biggest unsolved problems.
Yes, they're amazingly powerful and critically important and blah Blah BLAH. You can read all about them elsewhere. Paul Graham's On Lisp is the best reference I've found.
But they're fraught with problems. One is that they're not hygienic. You should at least have the option of requesting hygienic macros. Various papers have been published, and implementations implemented, for hygienic
defmacro. Yeah, it's hellishly hard to get right, and it's overkill for many situations, but it really does need to be offered as an option. A portable one.For that matter, you should also have a choice between Scheme-style pattern-matching macros and Lisp-style code-style macros. They're very different, and each kind is better (cleaner) in some situations. People often act as if hygiene is synonymous with define-syntax, but the pattern-template style is orthogonal to the question of hygiene.
Style considerations aside, macros have tool problems. Macros are notoriously hard to debug, and honestly it needn't be that way. If your editor knows all about macros, then you should be able to click to see the expansion, and click again to see its sub-expansions, all the way down to the primitive functions. Some editors can do this, but none of them (that I'm aware of) handle macros as cleanly or seamlessly as they do normal functions.
Syntax in general is a problem. Lisp has a little syntax, and it shows up occasionally as, for instance, '(foo) being expanded as (quote foo), usually when you least expect it. Truth be told, Lisp should probably have a skinnable syntax. That implies a canonical abstract syntax tree, which of course hasn't been defined (and in many implementations isn't even available to you, the way it is in the Io language, say). Once you've got a canonical AST defined, syntax should, in theory, be like CSS chrome. Of course, there are plenty of bodies left in the trail of this particular theory as well. Someday...
In any case, because macros are rarely supported "well enough" by the tools, and because they're not first-class functions, and so on, they wind up being second-class citizens. The rule "you should only use a macro when nothing else will do" implies that they really are a last resort, which (to me) is synonymous with band-aid. Yes, it's wonderful that you have the band-aid — or maybe duct tape is a better analogy — certainly you miss them dearly when you're working in other languages. But you don't want to have to build your entire object system with duct tape.
So macros, like the object system, need to be re-thought from the ground up. There's undoubtedly enough research in the space that someone could throw together a working definition in no time, something just good enough for today's programmers, the ones who expect (and rightfully so, I might add) to be able to name their methods "length" without getting a compiler error.
Problem 4: Type System
See, that's just exactly the problem with type systems. They can make sure you use headings, but they can't ensure you get the numbering right.
Well, it'll take me forever to talk about this one, so I'll have to leave it for another blog. The problem is that the type system has to be extensible and skinnable, and I'm not strictly talking about user-defined types in the sense of OOP or CLOS. Unfortunately it really is a huge open issue, one that'll take longer than this blog to sort through, so I'll have to leave it for today.
Lisp, for all the strengths of its flexible type system, hasn't got this issue right either. Otherwise Haskell and OCaml (and C++, gack) wouldn't be kicking its ass all over the performance map. 'nuff said, at least for now. [And no, they don't quite have it right either.]
I promise I'll talk about type systems soon. But I also promised some friends I'd make my blogs shorter.
There is no acceptable Lisp
This is a problem. It's not a little teeny one, either. The Lisp communities (yeah, there are a bunch) are going to have to realize that if Lisp is ever going to be massively successful, it needs an overhaul. Or maybe a revolution. Contrary to what some might tell you, it doesn't need a committee, and it doesn't need a bunch of money. Linux proved exactly the opposite. Lisp needs a benevolent dictator. Lisp needs to ditch the name "Lisp", since it scares people. And Lisp needs to learn from the lessons of the 45 years of languages that have followed it.
And no, I'm not the guy. You're all far more qualified to tackle this problem than I am. Especially if you're under 26.
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