

Haskell does not make the assumption that everyone has learned to compose arbitrary parsing operators. At the expression level, Haskell is stuck at a few hard-wired pattern matching primitives. Haskell, an implementation of typed category theory, is not this language either. Lisp is a machine language precursor to this idea, with various macro systems bolted on. Lisp, an implementation of the lambda calculus, is not this language. If a language was designed so parsing and manipulating itself was its sweet spot, generalizing this parsing to typed trees would be easy, and we'd invent many new programming paradigms. Scripting languages gain much of their leverage from nested hash tables.Ĭoncise versions of monadic parsing are exhilarating in their power and expressiveness. APL leveraged multidimensional array handling into a general purpose language. Ecosystem questions aside, a Turing-complete language needs to start by getting one thing right. There's an 80:20 rule for language emergence. We haven't begun to explore the design space, yet the best macro systems in other languages are copies of what lisp has figured out so far. A miracle, perhaps, but not what we'd see in a billion runs of the simulation.
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Others see the faintest exploration of the design space, an impoverished code base that made it impossibly far. Some people see life on earth and see God. You have to analyze your personal project to predict if the ecosystem matters more than Lisp's elegant syntax powers. The takeaway from the Reddit case study is this: Yes Lisp macros and language malleability gives it superpowers that other languages don't have (the "Blub Paradox") - but other languages also have other superpowers (ecosystem/libraries) that can cancel out the power of Lisp macros. 2001-04 Paul Graham : Lisp essay "Beating the Averages" The historical timeline is especially interesting because Reddit's cofounders Steve Huffman & Aaron Swartz were alumni of Paul Graham's first YC batch and PG is the author of the well-known Lisp essay "Beating the Averages": I think Reddit's decision to move from Common Lisp to Python is interesting and their reasoning (ecosystem) is still valid 15 years later.
