Comment by bowsamic

Comment by bowsamic a day ago

17 replies

View on Hacker News

Having developed in a wide variety of different languages in my free time, I really think the idea that languages like lisp and smalltalk give a sense of creative freedom is pretty overblown.

I have realised recently that there are much more concrete barriers to creative expression in coding: many of us are carrying around iPhones that you cannot write applications for, even for yourself, without paying a $100 a year fee. All the ways the language makes you feel means little compared to whether or not you can actually write code for your computer. The person who makes the computer can decide if you are allowed to be creative with it. And, as a society, we have decided (or perhaps been implicitly brainwashed?) to not want to be creative with our computers. In such a situation, the distinction between Java's OOP and Lisp's "computational ideas and expression" means very little.

A bit of a "Stallman was right" moment for me.

f1shy a day ago

Both Stallman and Rossman are right (in that regard) as far as I am concerned.

Now I do not mean to be rude, but I want to really drive a point home: what you are saying sounds to me like "Advances in medicine are not so relevant, because medicine is too expensive, and people in Africa cannot pay for it anyway".

You are mixing 2 totally independent things. That Apple exist, with all the bad things (and also the good) has nothing to do with how a programming language is designed. And all things being equal, people can feel more freedom to express their programs in one or other language, independent of what platforms are avaialble to later deploy them.

Note that while today Apple exists, there is Linux, which you can really do anything you want with, with total freedom (except of some little places with blobs if you are purist) but again, nothing to do with programming languages.

Reply View 2 replies
  • coliveira a day ago

    I think the comment above is applicable because programming is closer to writing than to medicine.

    A good example is the web. When it was given to us by Tim-Barnes Lee, the web was a free ecosystem with a simple markup language. But companies like Google decided that this was not a good thing, and now to develop a simple web site you need to know dozens of technologies, otherwise your web page will be considered outdated and disregarded by web search engines.

    The same process happened to programming languages, only the ones that could be molded to the needs of large companies were deemed to be "good".

    Reply View 0 replies
  • bowsamic a day ago

    Well they are both relevant to what it means to be creative and what allows for it.

    If the king banned painting and someone wrote an article comparing the creative differences between oil and watercolour, I would also then point out that the difference is minute compared to the king banning painting

    And that there is a country where painting is allowed does not mean it is not a major restriction for so many of us, or indeed we should not be so individualistic to say “just move”. I care how it affects others, not just me

    Reply View 0 replies
mark_l_watson a day ago

I love your comment, even disagreeing with the first sentence (I used Common Lisp and Swift yesterday - there is a difference for me).

I also don’t like the hurdles of writing private Apple ecosystem apps. Apple may fix this via Playgrounds, not sure though.

I feel captured by Apple’s ecosystem, and that is not a comfortable feeling. Also, Richard is right, we just don’t listen.

Reply View 1 reply
  • bowsamic a day ago

    It is a scary feeling, and scary to know how much people don’t care

    Reply View 0 replies
SomeHacker44 a day ago

This is a primary reason why I do not use Apple products. I use Windows and Linux on my laptops, and even have a ChromeBook. I use a SteamDeck as a console. I use Android phones, tablets and eReaders. I use Android based TVs and streamers. Even if I never code a line for them, I like that I could.

Reply View 0 replies
globular-toast a day ago

Stallman was right and that only becomes more clear to me with each day that passes. But there is a big difference between having the legal/technical ability to do something and that being at all practical. I'm becoming increasingly more concerned about the practical aspect rather than the technical.

Take the issue of freedom of speech. While it may be legally protected to various degrees, with the US having one of the strongest protections, is it practical when all communication happens on private platforms with opaque filtering ("moderation")?

I see the same thing in programming freedom. Android might technically be "open source" but it is no more practical to actually hack the software on your Android phone than an Apple phone. Similarly, PCs might be available that are under the complete control of the owners, but you need to be an expert programmer to realise this control.

Lisp is simply a more practical language to begin hacking. Emacs is probably the best example. Everything is there to make it easier to hack. It's not just technically free, it's practically free too.

Reply View 1 reply
  • coliveira a day ago

    The so called free speech is a technical advantage that gets lost by self-censorship applied by most of the media in the US. A recent example is people (who I disagree with) talking against vaccines, or major movie companies censoring topics that they don't like. This happens all the time.

    Reply View 0 replies
dunefox a day ago

And that has what exactly to do with Lisp? Pretty much irrelevant to the language itself.

Reply View 5 replies
  • bowsamic a day ago

    Well a major topic of the article is about the creativity that lisp affords compared to other languages. I’m pointing out that there are much more ultimate restrictions on creativity than programming language. I.e. whether the “powers that be” even allow you to program

    Also looping back to the article, it speaks about how lisp and smalltalk have fallen out of fashion which can explained by the more ultimate loss of permission and desire for creativity

    Reply View 4 replies
    • pjmlp a day ago

      I rather be creative for mobile devices while using Swift, Objective-C, Java or Kotlin, with their Smalltalk and Lisp influences from Xerox PARC work in what an IDE is supposed to be and language frameworks, than being stuck on the C and C+ mentality[0] that they are the only true way to develop for small devices.

      [0] - I really typed C+ and not C++ on purpose.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • bowsamic a day ago

        Sure, I’m not saying embedded programming in C is the way to go. That’s just a totally different thing to mobile app development

        Reply View 0 replies
    • dunefox a day ago

      That's why you should compare languages in proper environments, not make an irrelevant point about some mobile development platforms.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • bowsamic a day ago

        Is it irrelevant to creativity in programming and whether or not people use Lisp that the most commonly used computers in the world can't be programmed?

        Reply View 0 replies
timewizard a day ago

The world Lisp was born in is more like your iPhone example than the intervening years were. Lisp is older than POSIX by 20 years.

Reply View 2 replies
  • cbrozefsky a day ago

    I think this contributed more to the demise of CL than is recognized. It was cmucl, sbcl, and other free implementations that kept it alive thru the 90s.

    I don’t begrudge Franz and others their licenses, but what happened with the LMI and Symbolics IP is a cultural disaster.

    Reply View 0 replies