lispers? - Haskell

Welcome to the Functional Programming Zulip Chat Archive. You can join the chat here.

Mason Mackaman

Lisp is currently peaking my interest, but after being exposed to typed functional programming, the fact that it's dynamically typed and not pure is turning me off a little bit. that being said the homoiconicity and macros do sound pretty cool. Do any of you really enjoy using lisp (for practical use cases) despite also knowing haskell?

Vance Palacio

I find lisp to be incredibly elegant. Some people get turned off by the sheer volume of parentheses but the syntax is so stupidly simple! It's impressive how powerful the language is.

But like you, I also am saddened by the lack of types. But maybe you'll find this of some interest
https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications. - carp-lang/Carp
Mason Mackaman

Some people get turned off by the sheer volume of parentheses but the syntax is so stupidly simple!

yeah I actually really like the syntax :laughing:

But maybe you'll find this of some interest

I'll check it out, thanks!

Joel McCracken

IIRC https://github.com/finkel-lang/finkel is basically a lisp syntax for ghc

Haskell in S-expression. Contribute to finkel-lang/finkel development by creating an account on GitHub.
Joel McCracken

it is somewhere on my ever-expanding todo list to explore this

Joel McCracken

there is also hackett which you have probably seen, however its not really usable

Joel McCracken

big problem with shen is a lack of an effects system/ad-hoc effects

Joel McCracken

i've done a lot of lisp over the years (mosly scheme and emacs lisp); i do quite like it. Really, I will say that having done a reasonably-sized project in racket not long ago, the sheer volume of code it takes to do what is very succinct in haskell gets a bit annoying

Joel McCracken

SICP saved my career in CS; Java killed all my interest in programming while I was in Uni, and if I hadn't discovered SICP, Scheme, and FP, I was seriously considering switching majors

TheMatten

I too find Lisp to be very elegant in principle, but having to maintain older CLisp codebase at work, it feels sort of hard to reason about - I could jump into similarly old HS codebase without much hassle.
Maybe it's just lack of experience with it from my side, and I mean, I find other dialects like e.g. Racket to be very interesting, but I think that with their great power, Lisps may need more thought put into their ecosystem relative to many other languages to be productive - and CLisp ecosystem specifically seems to lack active support from my experience.

bradrn

If you’re looking for types, I’ve heard that SBCL has types nowadays, although you should take this with a grain of salt since I don’t use Lisp myself. (I’d love to find a use for it someday though — it looks amazing!)