In Kernel I would use something like this:

    true        #t
    false       #f
    null        ()
    [...]       (& ...)
    "k" : v     (: k v)
    {...}       (@ ...)  

    ($define! &
        ($lambda args (cons list args)))

    ($define! : 
        ($vau (key value) env
            (list key (eval value env))))
            
    ($define! @ 
        (wrap 
            ($vau kvpairs env 
                (eval (list* $bindings->environment kvpairs) env))))

    ($define! person
        (@
            (: first_name "John")
            (: last_name "Smith")
            (: is_alive #t)
            (: age 27)
            (: address 
                (@
                    (: street_address "21 2nd Street")
                    (: city "New York")
                    (: state "NY")
                    (: postal_code "10021-3100")))
            (: phone_numbers
                (& (@ (: type "home") (: number "212 555-1234"))
                   (@ (: type "office") (: number "646 555-4567"))))
            (: children
                (& "Catherine" "Thomas" "Trevor"))
            (: spouse ())))

    ($define! ? $remote-eval)

    > (? age person)
    27

    > (? postal_code (? address person))
    "10021-3100"

    > (car (? children person))
    "Catherine"

    > (cdr (? children person))
    ("Thomas" "Trevor")

    > (? type (cadr (? phone_numbers person)))
    "office"

    > (? number (car (? phone_numbers person)))
    "212 555-1234"

    > ($define! full_name ($lambda (p) (string-append (? first_name p) " " (? last_name p))))
    > (full_name person)
    "John Smith"

When I learned Scheme, I liked the language but strongly disliked macros and quotation. I'd only been using it a short while and when I searched for solutions to a few problems these "fexpr" things kept appearing up, which i didn't understand, and this "Kernel" language. I decided to learn it since "fexprs" were apparently the solution to several of my problems. This wasn't easy at first - I had to read the Kernel Report several times, but I ended up finding it way more intuitive than using macros and quotes.

I've not written a Scheme macro since. I've written hundreds of Kernel operatives though.

I was also a typoholic previously, but am in remission now thanks to Kernel.

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html

> [...] who thought it was okay to yell at people about [...]

That society as a whole accepts this kind of abuse, no matter industry or circumstances, is beyond me. It's an abuse of power. If anybody did this to anyone, the only appropriate response should be to walk and never come back. Nobody would want to accept this kind of crap from family and friends, so why is it ok in a professional setting? Because of the money/power dynamics at play? We need consensus in society to walk, that would end it in no time.

I've frequently said that Java + JRebel gets the closest to the Common Lisp + slime experience (closer than Python) but as you say the Lisp experience is still superior, the Java ecosystem has yet to close the gap*. The widest part of that gap I'd mention is in not having the condition system built-in to Java (though I'm aware people have tried to make a comparable one as a library), lacking it degrades the debugging experience considerably (even though simple step-debugging is typically more pleasant than in Lisp). IntelliJ's drop frame feature isn't good enough. The other problem is needing Java + something. What you get with just a regular JVM running under your IDE is no better than what other languages offer (if they offer anything) as their cute hotswap/hotpatch feature and comes with big limitations. (Like no changing method signatures or no adding/removing methods or properties, or only applying changes to new objects.) Once you're doing something non-trivial, especially if you're trying to incrementally develop your program rather than just debug one specific problem, you'll have to restart. In contrast Common Lisp's got its disassemble, describe, inspect, compile, fmakunbound, ... all being functions callable at runtime, and update-instance-for-redefined-class is part of the standard language too. Support for live reloading of everything is baked into the language rather than a hack on top, slime is just a convenient way of working with it. It's still convenient to restart the program occasionally, but few things force you to.

Unfortunately JRebel has killed their free tier, so I'd now point unwilling-to-pay programmers to something like https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime which is IntelliJ/Eclipse/whatever-independent. I haven't tried it myself yet though... Given they only address the biggest class reloading concerns, I doubt it's actually comparable to JRebel for business-world Java. JRebel handles among other things dynamic reloading from XML changes and reinitializing autowired Spring beans that other classes use for dependencies.

*Caveat, I've been out of the professional Java grind for a while, I'd be pleasantly surprised if some new version that's come out contradicts me.

This is doable in Common Lisp, Scheme/Racket, and Clojure. Yes, it might require some tooling.

That could very well be it. I guess I had gotten my hopes up, seeing the statement in a piece that purported to be specifically about Scheme .

"Cowboy thing" is putting it mildly. It invites/incentivises terrible behavioral patterns. The next guy looking has no idea what happened to that running system. (That next guy may well be you yourself a week or month later.)

You know, after some testing with a bunch of different scheme implementations, I take back what I said, at least for working in a REPL.

    (define (displayln msg) (display msg) (newline))
    (define (inner x) (+ x 1))
    (define (outer x) (inner x))
    (displayln (outer 5))
    (define (inner x) (+ x 2))
    (displayln (outer 5))

Clojure allows for that, giving you neat hot reload capabilities when working in Clojurescript. I believe Emacs Lisp works the same way, and allows for fairly fluid debugging sessions.

Universal hot reload is really a messy beast though. For every "yeah we can just reload this without re-init'ing the structure" there's another "actually reloading causes weird state issues and you have to restart everything anyways" thing.

I've found that hot reloading _specific targetting things_ tends to get you closer to where you want. But even then... sometimes using browser dev tools to experiment on the output will get you where you want faster than trying to hot reload clojurescript but having to "reset" state over and over again or otherwise work around weirdness.

I think this flow works well in Emacs though because you're operating on an editor. So you can change things, press buttons, change things, and have a good mental model. Emacs Lisp methods tend to have very little state to them as well (instead the editor is holding a bunch of exposed state).

Meanwhile React (for example) has _loads_ of hard-to-munge state that means that swapping one component for another inline might be totally fine or might just crash things in a weird way or might not have anything happen. Sometimes just a full page refresh will save you thinking about this

What makes you think it falls flat in a team setting? There are plenty of N-pizza-sized teams successfully using Lisp to this day and you're probably aware of many teams successfully using Lisp in the past, too. There's also the success of Clojure. What's required to have a well functioning team is mostly programming language independent; Lisp itself won't save a team lacking those properties anymore than say Java would.

In ruby it used to be common to ssh into a box, attach to the console and edit files from the REPL and rerun the code to see if your patch worked. I haven’t touched it in years and I doubt many people do that anymore.

Yeah not having an equivalent to pdb.set_trace() is what turned me off compiled languages, but with AI I'm not even sure anymore.

It not that hot swapping isn’t useful, it’s just difficult to do well and you need to write your code in a way that supports it. If you need 0 downtime on a device that can do a blue green deployment then the BEAM has you covered. Most people just don’t need that, so the extra hassle isn’t worth constantly considering how to migrate data in flight.

Being paused in the debugger is per-thread. If the server's using a thread-per-request model, and you're stopped in the request, then other requests can proceed just fine. If some of those requests also trigger the debugger, they'll pause and have to wait, they won't interrupt your current debugging view. Extra care should be taken in any sort of production debugging, of course. (At a Java BigCo, production debugging was technically allowed but required multiple signoffs, the engineer wasn't the one in control but had to direct someone else, lots of barriers to prevent looking at arbitrary customer data, and of course still limited to what you can do with a standard JVM restarted in debug mode. (Mainly setting breakpoints and walking stack traces.))

But the nicest part is that once you connect to the production application, apart from network lag it's no different than if you were developing and debugging locally on similarly specced hardware to the server, you have all the same tools. Many of the broader activities around "debugging" don't need to happen in a paused thread that was entered with an explicit breakpoint or error, they can happen in a separate thread entirely. You connect, then you can start inspecting (even modifying) any global state, you can define new variables, you can inspect objects, you can define new functions to test hypotheses, redefine existing functions... if you want all requests to pause until you're done, you can make it so. Or if you want to temporarily redirect all requests to some maintenance page, you can make that so instead. A simple thing I like doing sometimes when developing locally (and I could do it on a production binary too) is to define some (namespaced) global variable and redefine a singly-dispatched method to set it to the self object (possibly conditionally), and once I have it I might redefine the method again to have that bit commented out just so I know it won't change underneath me. Alternatively I can (and sometimes do) instead set this where the object is created. Then I have a nice variable independent of any stack frames that I can inspect, pass to other method calls, change properties of, whatever, at my leisure without really impacting the rest of the program's running operation. Another neat trick is being able to dynamically add/remove inherited mixin superclasses to some class, and when you do that it automatically impacts all existing objects of that class as well. Mixin classes are characterized by having aspect-oriented methods associated with them; you can define custom :before, :after, or :around methods independent of the primary method that gets called for some object.

kawa is unfortunately a somewhat shoddy project. Alot of halfbaked features / abstraction ideas (eg trying to support CL for whatever reason), dubious tooling for a java project (autotools), unclean and inconsistent code formatting. It's missing some features that are expected in a real scheme like multishot continuations; someone wrote research about it as a MSc thesis, but due to mentioned shoddiness its integration to upstream stalled and hadn't been merged.

At some point I thought of forking it to then cut out and polish the core, but then my attention got caught by graal's truffle framework as a plausibly better path for implementing scheme in java

Lisp was meant to be written with M-expressions instead of S-expressions anyway.

Whoa you were faster than me!

That's fine for a library or locally run executable, but I've worked on distributed systems in Haskell and you really need logging in place to track what is going on.

Of course, you will have IO somewhere in a executable where you can handle logging so just separate pure and IO and make sure you have good tests for the pure functions. Also, linting to catch partial functions and dangerous lazy ones (or use an alternative prelude).

What evolution in particular do you think? The developers use it for commercial products in quantum computing and defense [1]. That doesn't mean it's done in some complete language ecosystem sense (which is discussed in [1], and one could argue Haskell also never feels "finished"), but it also doesn't seem like an unfinished hobby project. Given that it's embedded in Common Lisp, there's always a way to fill in the library gaps, sort of like how if a "native" library doesn't exist in Clojure, one can always reach for Java.

[1] From Toward Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Software in Common Lisp at the European Lisp Symposium, "[Coalton] has been used for the past 5 or so years [...] first in quantum computing and now a serious defense application." https://youtu.be/xuSrsjqJN4M&t=9m14s

I could not agree less. People used to call Python “executable pseudocode” - in that spirit, Haskell is executable pseudo-math. If you’ve done enough higher math that a professor’s whiteboard notation feels natural to you, then Haskell might feel like a reasonable approximation of that style. Otherwise: it’s line noise.

(I write Haskell professionally)

I don't think:

"Haskell: more elegant than Javascript and C++" would make a good promotional motto.

That's like bragging how prettier you are than Danny Trejo.

This is not what "subjective" means. You can't argue something is subjective because many people don't agree with an opinion.

When someone argues subjectivity (in a negative sense), they need to show that the opinion does not rely on facts, rather it's based on... nothing (feelings).

I offered a very easy way to numerically assess the negative impact of poor language design choices made by Haskell designers. It's not about what I "feel" about the language: in Java, you write three-words program, and you get, usually, a unique interpretation. In Haskell, you write a three-words program, and you get 9 (nine) possible interpretations. It's impossible for a human to examine nine interpretations simultaneously and figure out which of them are valid and might fit the context. So, reading a Haskell program takes longer and requires more effort than a Java program.

Of course, Haskell programmers find ways to adapt to their misfortune. They try to avoid pathological cases (eg. writing four-words programs, let alone five!), they memorize a lot of acronyms and non-typographical symbols that they later use to prune the search for a possible meaning of the program. They invent conventions on top of the bare language design that constrain the search space for possible programs to make their task easier.

It's absolutely possible that after layers of conventions and a long time spent memorizing various acronyms and symbols, Haskell programmers catch up to speed of programmers in other languages: after all, the superficial difficulties with the language might seem like a small price to pay for the access to the language's riches that lay beyond the surface. The language grammar rules cannot account for the entirety of the performance of the programmers who chose to write in the language.

This situation is very similar to the "universal" (claimed, but not in practice) mathematical language, which is extremely difficult to read, write, edit, typeset... yet the tradition of using it prevails and the overwhelming majority of mathematicians use, and prefer using the "universal" mathematical language even though much saner alternatives exist.

There aren't a lot of Haskell programmers, so "lots" is maybe an exaggeration.

I see OP's point. Haskell feels (or felt, I admit I haven't been keeping up the last 15 years) needlessly obtuse sometimes, like how people love to invent new infix operators all the time.

> inner expressions must be indented more

Not to support the parent comment, which I disagree with, but If you use multi-line let-bindings, those require that you indent not just more than the previous line, but as much as the first token after the let keyword on the previous line. It’s a very strange rule, all the more surprising because it’s inconsistent even with the rest of the language. It is totally avoidable if you, like I think most experienced haskellers do, just prefer ‘where’, but people more familiar with procedural code usually lean into using ‘let’ everywhere because it feels more familiar.

I think the strange indentation used to be required in more places - I vaguely remember running into it a lot more when I started with Haskell 20 years ago, but that was also just when I was new to the language. These days I just keep ‘let’ to a bare minimum, so it doesn’t bother me. One thing that made Elm frustrating was that it disallowed ‘where’ clauses, forcing you to deal with this weird edge case all the time.

> I couldn't disagree more

[proceeds to agree on all points]

Not even sure what to tell you... Have more introspection?

No, it's not syntax highlighting.

For background: my first time in college, I was studying typography. An integral part of this trade is figuring out what is easier for people to read by answering questions s.a. what is the best line length, what number of columns per page is the best, what number of ascent elements per font face is the best, considering letter frequencies and coincidence and so on.

It also comes with the editing part, as in the trade of taking a manuscript (a text intended to be published) and making sure that the text meets certain reader expectations in terms of consistency, clarity, structure. This, obviously, includes the use of punctuation, but it's more about the language structure, things like adjectives order or anaphora usage etc.

Programming languages can be judged using the same rules, because, in the end of the day, we read them and need to interpret them. People have particular strengths and weaknesses when it comes to reading: we can remember the anaphora's anchor for only so long, we can hold only so many "variables" in fast-to-access memory, we only can do so many levels of adverb phrase nesting and so on.

Haskell was designed by someone completely oblivious to human abilities to read. It's very demanding and straining when it comes to extracting structure from text in the same way how, in English, you'd struggle to extract structure from so-called "garden path" sentences, because it's intentionally obfuscated. I don't believe Haskell is intentionally obfuscated, instead, I attribute the poor performance to the lack of awareness on the part of the author.

To convey the same point by means of example: Haskell is almost uniquely bad in that given a program

    A B C

There's absolutely no reason a language should offer these kinds of puzzles, especially in a very large quantity as Haskell does. Removing this "feature" would make the language a lot easier to work with.

You don't need syntax case to do advanced things though. Alex shinn's match.scm uses all the dirty syntax-rules trick.

It is pretty awful to write things like that.

It's just not good because you need to work around its limitations, whatever its purpose is. Not good for prototyping because it's the red tape you need to cut to get work done. Red tape isn't, in general, a bad thing, but when it comes to prototyping it is.

I wish there was some sort of a single metric that would allow measuring languages against each other and thus determining the best one. Unfortunately, there are multiple variables and the relationship between the variables is unclear. But, going totally with my gut feeling, some examples of good languages (in terms of ease of reading) include:

* Prolog (and, by extension, Erlang).

* Pascal.

* Java 5 and earlier (and Go, as it's almost a Java's twin).

These languages somehow manage to hit the sweet spot of enough system and enough diversity, few unexpected syntax constructs (eg. Pascal or Java have the "dangling else" problem, but it's manageable compared to the problems introduced by optional statement delimiters in Go or JavaScript for example). In every case, a programmer must program defensively against these sorts of language "pathologies".

To give some examples of questionable or outright bad design decisions:

* In Common Lisp (and Scheme as well as a number of similar languages) there's a problem with identifying the open parenthesis that will be closed by typing the closing parenthesis. Programmers must invent tools and techniques to manage this problem.

* In C++, there's a laughable (or, at least was, for a long time) rookie "whoopsie" when it comes to ">>" in templates vs infix operator. And the "solution" offered by the language designer makes you think they were just... lazy (add space).

Here are also examples of some (perhaps, accidentally) good decisions:

* Kebab-case in many Lisp family of languages. In Latin script, the position of the hyphen in the middle of the lower-case letter is a better choice then, eg. underscore (which is tutted to be a "not a typographic character"). Same reason why, eg. in traditional Hebrew hyphens are at the height of a capital letter (Hebrew doesn't have lower-case letters and the shape of letters is better suited for hyphens at the top rather than the middle).

* Clojure as well as Racket (afaik, deliberately) introduced more kinds of parenthesis-like delimiters to make it easier to guess which expression is being terminated by the currently typed delimiter.

* * *

Note that this is a "superficial" metric, because languages are also valuable for concepts they are able to express both in terms of program logic as well as program application to the hardware it manages; the ability to process, modify, generate, analyze the language automatically; the ability to constrain the language to a desired subset of all available operations... Incorporating all of these into a single metric seems like mission impossible :)

> Are you mixing tabs and spaces? Maybe an example here would help.

This is not what "rules" means. Rules aren't about what I do. Rules are about what the language treats as legal or illegal. I don't write in Haskell at all because I don't like it and have no use for it, but Haskell rules don't change because of that, they are still mindbogglingly complex when it comes to telling the programmer if the next line is the right amount of space to the right or not. None of that complexity is necessary and could've been totally avoided if the language used statement delimiters.

> No, this is important, so that default strings don't to have to be something crummy.

My argument is that to get a little accidental convenience you sacrificed a huge amount of routine convenience. The mental load of having to distrust a string when you see it is just not worth the accidental convenience of writing a prepared statement and making it appear as if it was a string. In other words, you are the guy who traded a donkey for three beans, but the beans didn't sprout into a huge ladder that took you to the giant's castle. You just made a very watery soup and that was that.

> Again, an example would be helpful.

Look up the example I gave in the adjacent reply.

> I thought lazy execution was widely agreed to be the worst part of Haskell.

It's good because it's unique and, when it fits the purpose, it's useful for that particular purpose and neigh irreplaceable, because it is unique. It's worth having for the sake of research, to understand how languages can be designed and what tools or techniques can be discovered on this path. This is said from the perspective that Haskell is not the end product, but rather a research attempting to study how languages can work and what concepts they can develop.

Can you say more about the system? A lifetime ago I was really excited about gambit (and bigloo) but I never had the chance to work with them beyond messing around here and there after work.

Jank looks promising if you want a typed Lisp. It’s essentially native Clojure without the JVM: https://jank-lang.org/

In case you're into machine learning, I'm also building something similar - a tensor-first, native Clojure-like ML framework.

There's also Crunch Scheme(from creator of Chicken): https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/6/crunch

That's why I switched to Common Lisp, its type system isn't perfect but it works well enough for my needs (especially with the occasional (describe 'sycamore:tree-insert) in the REPL).

https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp might be of interest. It's a statically typed lisp.

I get where you're coming from but I talked to a few folks working in large Haskell codebases and I'm not sure I would make that trade.

Or that the AI is the REPL?

Whenever someone complains about not being able to use a slightly different syntax, I assume they just don't have any neuroplasticity anymore.

Obligatory "The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer":

https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

I think in terms of token count it comes out to about the same; and Lisp admits fewer kinds of tokens.