[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


Suckless-like Community for Scheme/Lisp

11 2020-05-20 14:02

>>10

Most of my encounters with Lisps have been in a unix environment. But I still see Lisp set in opposition to Unix, not just other programming languages, on a regular basis, as if there were this large contingent of hackers running Lisp Machines or working on ITS somewhere.

The argumentation here seems flawed. One can for example imagine a dissident who lives in a grim and dystopian society. Would it be reasonable to say that because this individual lives in this society that there is no opposition between the individual and this society? There are several differences between the Lisp approach and the UNIX approach. The first distinction, is on module boundaries. UNIX advocates small program where every program parses input text and serializes output text, while Lisp encourages the creation of interactive systems with modularity on the basis of functions which pass and return native data-structures. Emacs is an example of this despite its increased emphasis on text than some other Lisp applications. Another distinction is the difference between the “New Jersey style” and the “MIT/Stanford style”. Unfortunately, the decentralized development process some projects have taken has pushed many Lisp and UNIX projects alike in a direction which isn't inline with either of these philosophies (including GNU Emacs). This distinction still often remains with the Lone Lisp Hacker and the Lone UNIX Hacker however, and this distinction has dramatic implications. Yet another distinction is the focus of the UNIX hacker on constant time optimisations to the Lisp Hackers focus on complexity analysis. In practice these distinctions manifests as the difference between a hierarchical file-system and a tag based file-system, the difference between a text file and a binary representation of native data-structures which can be saved to disk or over the network, and the difference between an application which is fast in the best case but unusable in the worst, for example. There are many more differences I didn't go into as well, but I'd like to emphasize that it's clearly not the case that every Lisp programmer follows the entirety of the Lisp philosophy just like it's not the case that every UNIX programmer follows the entirety of the UNIX philosophy, and you can of course program Lisp in the style of UNIX.

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