[HN Gopher] Lisp project of the day
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       Lisp project of the day
        
       Author : perihelions
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2025-07-25 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (40ants.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (40ants.com)
        
       | jksmith wrote:
       | "An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age." Heavy opinion:
       | Combined with AI, there is a story for unified app development.
       | Something like Ada for the L1 and trust reciprocation, then
       | something that creates app domain vocabularies for L2
       | development. That of course would be lisp.
        
         | lispitillo wrote:
         | Sorry, but I don't get the meaning of your phrasing. I think
         | that to use AI you must be very explicit and clear about what
         | you want to design, and if Lisp provides some advantages one
         | should define accurately the specific tool to use and when,
         | how, and why.
         | 
         | I recall Norvig mentioning that other computer languages have
         | taken many ideas from Lisp, those languages are also in the new
         | civilization. Just to give an example: destructing-bind, apply
         | and others are now done in javascript with a shorter syntax,
         | and javascript without macros has excellent speed.
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | The quoted portion is a reference to an XKCD strip from
           | earlier this century, https://xkcd.com/297/, which is a
           | reference to Star Wars.
           | 
           | Their use of L1 and L2 should be read as "L" as "level" L1 is
           | lower level, L2 is higher level. They're suggesting using Ada
           | (or some other well-suited language) for the lower level
           | trusted systems language and Lisp for the application
           | language.
           | 
           | What it has to do with AI, I don't know. People want AI
           | everywhere now.
        
       | lispitillo wrote:
       | Perhaps instead of coding many small one day projects one could
       | program one day projects that compose with each other. For
       | example, I was thinking about developing a library that
       | implements a version of J in Common Lisp (but I think fuel is
       | lacking) so that, for example, the one day project named random-
       | sample could be just:                 randomSample =: 4 :'(x ?
       | #y){y' NB. can't repeat.            randomSample =: 4 :'(? x #
       | #y){y' can repeat.           So that, in many cases,  one day
       | projects could be reduced to one or two lines definitions (for
       | those that know J that is the caveat).
        
         | monospacegames wrote:
         | I think they're showcasing existing projects instead of making
         | a new one each day.
        
           | lispitillo wrote:
           | Thanks, it seems you are right. The random-sample project
           | seems so short that I thought it was a one day project and
           | that the other would be also short projects.
        
         | v9v wrote:
         | Not J, but there is an APL compiler made in Common Lisp here:
         | https://github.com/phantomics/april
        
           | lispitillo wrote:
           | Thanks for the April reference. In the post [1] there are
           | just 11 comments and also it seems that the intended audience
           | could maybe two dozen people!, not very encouraging to create
           | a J in Common Lisp.
           | 
           | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225136
        
       | vindarel wrote:
       | It's great but some chosen libraries are a bit too random or
       | early. You can look at a curated list of Common Lisp libraries
       | here: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-25 23:01 UTC)