Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • > You are not writing dead text; you are conversing with a living system.

    There it is again.

    by xdavidliu
  • "conversing with a living system" aka "using a common debugging tool"
    by zapataband1
  • Was going to write something about the article but then poked around the blog and it led to Github including this gem: https://github.com/jrm-code-project/llambda which is much more interesting.

    I do agree with a lot of the article though, Lisp plays nicely with LLMs. Definitely had better luck with Lisp and LLMs than C++ or Rust.

    Also, kind of random, but here's an interesting tool to use CL with LLMs: https://www.lambda-symbolics.com/autolith

    by dismalaf
  • I don't know if anything has changed, but last time I tried codegen for Common Lisp, the LLM would routinely mix up LISP dialects and language specific features.

    Less so with Clojure.

    by PrimalPower
  • It used to happen last year but really isn't a thing anymore (assuming you use frontier models).
    by varjag
  • I've been using LLMs for Common Lisp since Sonnet 3.7 and have never experienced that. Did you have a mixture of other lisps nearby to confuse it? Seems like an odd failure mode.
    by wild_egg
  • I’m fascinated that some people in our field choose to self describe themselves as “elite”.

    Are there any programming/computer science greats that self aggrandize like this? Is it a cultural thing somewhere that I’m not aware of?

    by shric
  • "Für Elite" by Letrec Var Bughaven
    by kazinator
  • I've been programming in Common Lisp for a quarter century and that list item made me cringe.
    by aidenn0
  • Hey, are people not allowed to self select as smug Lisp weenies anymore? Even on HN?

    What Lisp enthusiasts lost in terms of actual status in the programming world they make up for themselves in their niche corners and everyone is happy at the end.

    by 0xpgm
  • I interpreted this as being a little tongue-in-cheek - reflecting the obscurity of CL and the way the expressiveness of a lisp can make you feel powerful that others will struggle to understand
    by chris_armstrong
  • I don't get the impression the author is attributing eliteness to themselves. Wanting to use tools designed by and for "the elite", whomever that is, doesn't mean one necessarily considers themselves to be elite.

    When it comes to writing software, I don't consider myself elite, but neither do I want to use a language designed by some mid-level engineer. Do you?

    by stackghost
  • Roughly just over one-thousand people, precisely 1,337 people self-describe as elite in the field.
    by jpcom
  • Most well known Dijkstra, who it can safely be said, is one of the greats. Though this blog post is a little much with the whole elite thing there is a little much, I think a rather terrible attitude that is antithetical to it is that of 'Democratization' which seeks to strip skill and need to learn from building and interacting with technology often at the expense of many positive attributes. It hates any thing that requires skill or simply prior learning to use well despite often these things meaning the system overall can better serve the user better and one the prior work has been done is more effective.

    Further this 'Democritisation' can be seen as trying to deskill something that taking away many positives and having contempt for skill. I believe This is often simply to devalue software developers and I assume you are one so I believe we should both be cautious of this devaluation.

    I think a more interesting question would be why should we not have elite's and I don't know if I am unusual but false humility always rubs me the wrong way?

    by kodoman
  • Let's look at what TFA actually says:

      Let’s be honest: Lisp is a language designed by and for elite hackers, not for the masses.
    What do other people say about other languages?

      Python is best for novice coders, machine learning, and versatility.  [https://www.boot.dev/blog/python/c-sharp-vs-python]

  Golang: Simpler and minimalistic language with fewer features, making it easier for beginners and experienced developers to learn and use effectively.  [https://charleswan111.medium.com/java-vs-golang-a-comparative-insight-into-usage-performance-and-industry-preferences-533a24013230]

  JavaScript is also considered to be more user-friendly and easier to learn than C++.  [https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/blogs/cpp-vs-javascript-programming]
    If one is allowed to compare apples and oranges, then surely one is allowed to compare oranges and apples.
    by mrkeen
  • I have been using cl for a project recently, as it had many features I wanted and actually made sense to use despite not being familiar with it (though used elisp and a tiny bit of scheme). I found it mixed some things where fantastic some things remain pain points, SBCL is a fantastic project and compiler and once you get used to the debugging it's a very nice experience with slime. It is true to say that it's flexibility is fantastic and CLOS object system once you get used to it is very nice. On AI assisted coding I found it mixed and though Claude now seems quite good at it, local models can be quite poor and lots of things are a lot less well documented and the fact that there is less code out there. One thing to look out for with local models (and probably even the frontier models but with there larger size negates the issue entirely from my usage) is that '(' or ')' might be part of a token such that '))' is a discrete token and '(*' might be as well, all that is to say that when it writes code terminating and start blocks can be an issue so your parens will be off, this was when using omnicoder 9B and that was the main issue. not sure how more recent local models function as switched to claude for part of it and tended to prefer to take my time and write the code myself.
    by kodoman
  • In many of my LLM projects, I have been using DSLs for all kinds of purposes. As many of these projects, data is kind of central, I use Django. So for these DSLs, hy (lisp combined with python) has been working quite well. I have not had trouble with Claude Code writing hy code.
    by kukkeliskuu
  • I guess a weakness of the common benchmarks (artificial intelligence, gertlabs, and others) is that, from my understanding, they don't really cater to each language's specificity. If a language such as CL or Clojure boasts a superior REPL experience, that's entirely ignored by benchmarks, because they just look at the result of generic prompting. So maybe instead of writing countless blog posts on the superiority of such and such language, we should work on improving the benchmarking methodology. Then we would get more useful results.
    by Athanase000
  • Yeah no thanks. Common Lisp is the only language that still brings me joy in a post LLM world and I'd like to keep it that way.
    by TurboHaskal
  • It's too bad that SBCL has accepted LLM code.
    by NoGravitas
  • I spent quite a while trying to learn Common Lisp and I really wanted to like it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The first problem is finding good learning materials, as most are out of print. On the language side people complain about the parens, which turns out is no big deal. There’s a lot of other weird or needlessly tricky stuff though. The function names are convoluted (e.g. there’s map, but also mapc, mapcan, mapl, maplist). Image based development was interesting, but you might waste an hour debugging because your image diverged from the actual code. Building an actual executable is more complicated than you’d expect, and there’s a lot of magic with packages. There’s some elegance there if you squint, but other lisps are probably better.
    by abbefaria27
  • Common Lisp is unfortunately a merge of multiple competing Lisps from the time period, much like Unix (SysV and BSD stuff). It was probably reasoned that a messy, imperfect standard is better than no standard or a restricted standard that is useless without proprietary extensions and requires constant revisions by a standing committee. There are good reasons to deviate from it and come up with a cleaner Lisp, but people better learn all the lessons Common Lisp has to offer before they do so.
    by samus
  • CL was recommended to me here. I had only played with Scheme over the years (SICP and Little Schemer - which, I used to recommend to every engineer that answered to me). I quickly bought Practical Common Lisp in hardcover (used). The language has a LOT to love. But it's caused me to go back and revisit Scheme(s). I put down my CL book to look at The Scheme Programming language and Chez Scheme. Going through all of this without an LLM has restored some joy. But I can understand reluctance to use this unless I could assemble a team with a ton of knowledge. Prompting for Lisp sounds like fun. But not having the deep understanding means I'd be blindly accepting its suggestions. I can't say what Lisp would be better. Clojure maybe?
    by nobleach
  • I suggest Practical Common Lisp by Seibel https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

    I now generate ALL of my hobby projects in CL (SBCL on windows). I tell the LLM to 'over-comment' the code, so I get to learn as I read the output. It has been glorious. I generally use the web browser on an unused port on localhost for user IO (beautiful pages), and the app just hooks to Hunchentoot to serve.

    Any 'real' programming language (meaning, one that is truly general purpose: numeric stacks, Web front and back ends, system code, utilities, etc) will always have some cruft. In CL, at least you can understand why some cruft exists. And you get used to it, because it's not like e.g. C where there are some very dark corners indeed. Check out Peter's book!

    CL lets you build real apps, for real. No toys. This has value.

    by GeorgeTirebiter
  • Wrote my first Lisp program in high school 1974; during a teacher's strike some of us geeks bussed it down to the University of Toronto computing centre. It was cafeteria system with a room full of keypunch machines. You typed up your program and got in line with your card deck. The line started with some silos of job cards. You could write fortran, lisp, pl/1, watbol, snobol, etc and run it on an IBM 360 mainframe.

    You placed your deck on top of the card hopper when your turn came up. Most programs were 1/2 inch of cards so there were lots of jobs in a hopper that would take two feet of cards.

    The line continued until a 1442 line printer at the end where your resulting printout came reeling out at alarming speeds. Operators handed you your printout and you returned to the keypunch room to review your results and make the necessary changes to your card deck.

    The cool thing was we were obviously 15 years old and definitely not attending U of T. And our jobs were plainly not for a class because our card decks were 1 1/2 inches thick with long printouts of gameboard configurations.

    But nobody ever batted an eye. We went every day for months.

    Eventually I went to Uni during the era of the lisp machines. I worked for a professor who got me an office in the cpsc building. He paid me slave wages but the Lisp Machine lab was across from my office so they gave me a key to let people in who didn't have theirs. Bunch of Symbolics 36xx machines running chaosnet. A loud but life altering experience spending time in there. I spent enough time that I had a cot in my office.

    That was mid 1980s, and I've carried on writing Lisp to this day. I still like to run that emulated Symbolics environment that's out there. To this day it's a very effective Lisp environment. The design of the REPL alone is blow-your-mind.

    Am I elite? No, but my beard is grey. And on the subject of code generation, the last thing Symbolics did was port their code to the DEC Alpha, the first 64 bit chip. The port compiled their code into lisp macros that expanded to DEC Alpha instructions. The plan was to use different macros for different chips, which was done when the Power PC chip came along.

    Then somebody at MIT wrote a little C backend that pretended to be a DEC alpha, and used macros that expanded into calls to the little C backend. That's what allows us to run a mid 1990s Symbolics 3600 image on any of today's 64 bit machines.

    by tigermelville
  • Unfortunately, I missed the Lisp machine era by a whisker. AI winter was just hitting as I graduated college (1989), and I got hired working on RISC systems, which were pretty much the opposite of Lisp machines at the hardware level. I have yet to get the emulated Genera environment running, but the repl does look wild.

    Fun fact: symbolics.com was the first-ever domain name registered by IANA.

    by drob518
  • My gut feeling is, this post is 180° wrong. LLMs are the exact opposite of "elite coders", they're perfect StackOverflow users:

    * they memorize adapt and write back small-scale patterns very efficiently; * they know widespread libraries inside out, and can learn others in minutes, even if their doc sucks; * they often produce good results, because most of the time we write unoriginal code, which paraphrases something it already has dozens of versions of in their training corpus; * but they're bad at seeing meaningful, non-obvious, simplifying abstractions, we really have to spoon-feed those to them; * they _love_ verbosity, that's literally how they "think"; * they also love repetition: the other term for "repetition" is "patterns", and they're basically excellent pattern matchers.

    So, Lisp is enjoyable for your typical LLM-complementary hacker, but not for LLMs. LLMs typically replace the kind of "non-elite" developers who hated Lisp, for remarkably similar reasons.

    What I'd love would be an LLM trained to faithfully rephrase a "normal" program into Lisp-ish pseudo-code, that would make reviews faster, more reliable, more enjoyable. But hand-written code is going the way of hand-written machine code; let LLMs have what suits them best, and higher level tools for the more abstract jobs where we're still relevant, and that would be various forms of code reviews.

    As for calling "elite" the kind of developer won't understand that development is a team sports, and that the proper tool is the one that fits the team, not their own peculiar quirks, I'm not going to address that, it isn't the keystone of his argument; but a lot could and should be said about that too.

    by fab13n
  • "180° wrong" as "0° right"? Just that bit, not that I disagree.
    by amboo7
  • I spent the last year writing substantial Common Lisp, including a FoundationDB client and distributed systems primitives layered on top of that, an observability and operability library for CL systems, and a large scale log, metrics and tracing platform that leverages these - in about 200K lines of code and tests. My take on this, apart from one of familiarity and personal preference/taste in choosing a programming language, in the age of LLMs are - 1. From a “functional requirements” perspective, any language will do. You can build substantial systems in something low level like C or higher level like Python or Common Lisp for example. 2. From a security perspective, if you are using LLM assisted code generation, whether you use C or Rust or Common Lisp does not really matter I think - current models are capable, and future models perhaps more so, in producing secure code.

    My understanding is that LLM are deflationary, resulting in code being priced as a commodity (cost plus). If this bears out, then lower token costs and higher performance (esp in my case, where good performance results in lower infra costs to host the service) will start to matter more and more. Common Lisp code bases are famously dense (in the good sense), resulting in perhaps lower token costs when an LLM needs to review and make a change (smaller code bases also help humans / small teams). Common Lisp can achieve performance that’s close to that of an equivalent implementation in C or C++.

    Taken together, they make for one case for using CL and other similar languages, although one that’s grounded largely in economics.

    by varoun
  • Do you really think current LLMs can implement a large application in C as securely as they can in e.g. Go? I will freely admit that I have not tried to do so but I have a hard time imagining it. Perhaps my biases are outdated...
    by traes