Is Smalltalk the new Clojure, lacking only real world applicability?
I should explain. Two marvelous ideas entered the marketplace last century. One fell apart because it was seen as the domain of AI and academics, with implementations being too like forth (you learn one forth, and you’ve learned one forth) for people’s likings. The other was embroiled in legal battles and refused to acknowledge that it wasn’t the computer. This was quickly deemed, though not obvious at the time, unacceptable. Even C doesn’t care what the kernal is, so long as it has a standard library, and polyglot systems are just More Useful.
I speak, of course, about LISP and Smalltalk.
Clojure is LISP made Really Useful. It can be used to glue Java together with almost no code, runs on possibly the most popular and recognizable virtual machine in the world, and the functional twist took out a lot of the dark corners out of the language
Clojure made LISP usable.
As for Smalltalk, the Pharo VM does a great job of being modem, using the Cog JIT engine, and even (in an upcoming release?) being able to respect the world outside the VM. I love the language, one person describes it as an unhealthy fascination, and I would recommend people learn the lessons of Smalltalk.
As for me, I learned a lesson from the failures of Smalltalk, and it isn’t one people think about. I want to codify my ideas as a language, as soon as I have the time to do so. I want to make Smalltalk applicable to server operators and packagers. Blog posts on the topic to follow.
Smalltalk had a resurgence some 10 years ago with interest in the Seaside web app framework and a few hyped Smalltalk web apps. I recall DabbleDB as one that seemed impressive at the time.
If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest looking at Strongtalk, Self, and Newspeak. And what the space between them and Objective-C looks like.
To quite some extent I think the space between ObjC and Smalltalk-likes is occupied by Ruby. More Smalltalk-like than ObjC, easier C (or really, host platform code in general) FFI than a Smalltalk.
It really is, but Ruby has a bad rap these days, no advantage Python doesn’t in the realm of writing usable code, and an unfortunate load average and dependency story.
I have to disagree with that. Lisp is very usable (and quite nice) on its own. Perhaps Clojure made it usable for gluing Java together, but huge swathes of the software world don’t involve Java, and are still well suited to Lisp.
I love Scheme, but I’ve tried to learn Common Lisp a three times times, and each time I got frustrated. Whether because the lack of Vim support (I can’t be bothered to learn emacs, and it just confuses me), or because quicklisp doesn’t do what I expect, I can never quite understand what’s going on under the hood. It’s a shame too, because I’m fascinated by some of the cool CL projects like CEPL.
However, if we’re including Scheme, I also disagree with the statement that Clojure is the first usable language in the Lisp family. Guile and chicken scheme are both very easy to get started with out of the box, and Racket has a full on IDE geared towards education, superb technical documentation, and tutorials that makes it easy to get started.
I’m afraid I also disagree. Lisp users before Clojure are of a different breed entirely, a more skilled and arcane breed. Clojure is accessible to and used by the masses to write useful code and libraries.
That’s flattering (I guess), but I’m not sure it’s true. By some measures Common Lisp is still more popular than Clojure.
TIOBE’s language ranking isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and it claims Clojure and Common Lisp are both down in the 50-100 group, behind generic “Lisp” at 32 and Scheme at 34.
However, “Lisp” is often taken to mean “Common Lisp” nowadays (for example the #lisp IRC channel is dedicated specifically to Common Lisp), so those rankings may be interpreted as meaning CL is more popular.
Also, I wold claim CL is at least as accessible as Clojure. It’s not as trendy, but it has more implementations, supports more platforms, isn’t tied to the JVM, and has a bunch of tutorials and books covering it.
And of course there are plenty of useful libraries and applications being written in CL today.
Originally learned about Lisp from AI books. That would make me agree with you. Then, later books like Practical Common Lisp and Land of the Lisp are way more approachable better things for mainstream audience to build. Important they get that IDE that allows incremental, per-function compilation. That by itself might win them over. Alternatively, they can start with Scheme using How to Design Programs trying Common Lisp if they get HtDP.
I have a feeling you’ll see a lot more people in it if the educational resources, community, and tooling facilitate the learning process. In that order for Lisp.
Smalltalk was one of the first languages I learned along with Ruby and I don’t regret the time I invested in doing so. The article gives plenty of good reasons for learning and I’ll add one more. Learning smalltalk gives one a visceral understanding of objects and message passing the same way Prolog gives one a visceral understanding of backtracking and logic variables. Seeing how computation can be structured with so few primitives hones one’s programming design sense. And like all things in programming it is a useful mental model to have in one’s problem solving toolkit and not something to be religious about.
the way classes and methods are arranged is very rigid, giving a lot of static structure to the system organisation. This static structure is what unlocks the powerful tooling, and is what simplifies the programmer’s mental model to make the system understandable
Can’t really speak for the author but I think he means it is easy to meta-program because there are so few primitives to worry about and they recombine in obvious ways.
Is Smalltalk the new Clojure, lacking only real world applicability?
I should explain. Two marvelous ideas entered the marketplace last century. One fell apart because it was seen as the domain of AI and academics, with implementations being too like forth (you learn one forth, and you’ve learned one forth) for people’s likings. The other was embroiled in legal battles and refused to acknowledge that it wasn’t the computer. This was quickly deemed, though not obvious at the time, unacceptable. Even C doesn’t care what the kernal is, so long as it has a standard library, and polyglot systems are just More Useful.
I speak, of course, about LISP and Smalltalk.
Clojure is LISP made Really Useful. It can be used to glue Java together with almost no code, runs on possibly the most popular and recognizable virtual machine in the world, and the functional twist took out a lot of the dark corners out of the language
Clojure made LISP usable.
As for Smalltalk, the Pharo VM does a great job of being modem, using the Cog JIT engine, and even (in an upcoming release?) being able to respect the world outside the VM. I love the language, one person describes it as an unhealthy fascination, and I would recommend people learn the lessons of Smalltalk.
As for me, I learned a lesson from the failures of Smalltalk, and it isn’t one people think about. I want to codify my ideas as a language, as soon as I have the time to do so. I want to make Smalltalk applicable to server operators and packagers. Blog posts on the topic to follow.
Smalltalk had a resurgence some 10 years ago with interest in the Seaside web app framework and a few hyped Smalltalk web apps. I recall DabbleDB as one that seemed impressive at the time.
If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest looking at Strongtalk, Self, and Newspeak. And what the space between them and Objective-C looks like.
Good luck!
To quite some extent I think the space between ObjC and Smalltalk-likes is occupied by Ruby. More Smalltalk-like than ObjC, easier C (or really, host platform code in general) FFI than a Smalltalk.
It really is, but Ruby has a bad rap these days, no advantage Python doesn’t in the realm of writing usable code, and an unfortunate load average and dependency story.
I have to disagree with that. Lisp is very usable (and quite nice) on its own. Perhaps Clojure made it usable for gluing Java together, but huge swathes of the software world don’t involve Java, and are still well suited to Lisp.
I love Scheme, but I’ve tried to learn Common Lisp a three times times, and each time I got frustrated. Whether because the lack of Vim support (I can’t be bothered to learn emacs, and it just confuses me), or because quicklisp doesn’t do what I expect, I can never quite understand what’s going on under the hood. It’s a shame too, because I’m fascinated by some of the cool CL projects like CEPL.
However, if we’re including Scheme, I also disagree with the statement that Clojure is the first usable language in the Lisp family. Guile and chicken scheme are both very easy to get started with out of the box, and Racket has a full on IDE geared towards education, superb technical documentation, and tutorials that makes it easy to get started.
you know there are perfectly good IDEs for Lisp that are not Emacs? Clozure Lisp (CCL) [Opensource], Lispworks personal edition [Free].
And there is nothing stopping you from using Atom, Visual Studio Code or Sublime text with Lisp plugins.
I’m afraid I also disagree. Lisp users before Clojure are of a different breed entirely, a more skilled and arcane breed. Clojure is accessible to and used by the masses to write useful code and libraries.
That’s flattering (I guess), but I’m not sure it’s true. By some measures Common Lisp is still more popular than Clojure.
TIOBE’s language ranking isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and it claims Clojure and Common Lisp are both down in the 50-100 group, behind generic “Lisp” at 32 and Scheme at 34.
However, “Lisp” is often taken to mean “Common Lisp” nowadays (for example the #lisp IRC channel is dedicated specifically to Common Lisp), so those rankings may be interpreted as meaning CL is more popular.
Also, I wold claim CL is at least as accessible as Clojure. It’s not as trendy, but it has more implementations, supports more platforms, isn’t tied to the JVM, and has a bunch of tutorials and books covering it.
And of course there are plenty of useful libraries and applications being written in CL today.
Originally learned about Lisp from AI books. That would make me agree with you. Then, later books like Practical Common Lisp and Land of the Lisp are way more approachable better things for mainstream audience to build. Important they get that IDE that allows incremental, per-function compilation. That by itself might win them over. Alternatively, they can start with Scheme using How to Design Programs trying Common Lisp if they get HtDP.
I have a feeling you’ll see a lot more people in it if the educational resources, community, and tooling facilitate the learning process. In that order for Lisp.
Smalltalk was one of the first languages I learned along with Ruby and I don’t regret the time I invested in doing so. The article gives plenty of good reasons for learning and I’ll add one more. Learning smalltalk gives one a visceral understanding of objects and message passing the same way Prolog gives one a visceral understanding of backtracking and logic variables. Seeing how computation can be structured with so few primitives hones one’s programming design sense. And like all things in programming it is a useful mental model to have in one’s problem solving toolkit and not something to be religious about.
What does that refer to?
Can’t really speak for the author but I think he means it is easy to meta-program because there are so few primitives to worry about and they recombine in obvious ways.