Applied Language

I would not hold my breath for it to revive software engineering, if the end result is purportedly to make a pretty program. No doubt quality is severely lacking in modern programming, but programming is a means to ends other than autoeroticism. And Forth is nothing new as a low-level, bending-over-to-the-machine language [1], except that its users to have constant urges to decry everything else as bloat (first link), civilisation-threatening, training wheels (third link), and all those wonderful things. Just don't do anything [0], and hoorah, you can write nothing too. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771886 is a classic on that topic. [1] Bemusingly this does not make it necessarily fast; some Forthen are too simple and too low-level for compilers to get much done, c.f. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.html#orgf7… for the video described in the third link.

CL-PPCRE actually doesn't really do what most people think it does, cf https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html#orgd52b4ab (which instead does). A small tidbit: you don't actually need full syntactic macros to get compile time computation in CL, compiler macros (https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_bba.htm) suffice.

"Lisp Curse" is really a myth, or at least, it completely fails to apply to the Common Lisp community. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.html

Is you actually look at the Lisp ecosystem as it exists today (even just Emacs by itself) you'll quickly realize that none of this is true in practice. Other people have pointed this out.[0] [0] https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.html

If you claim it's the fastest, how does it compare to one-more-re-nightmare? - https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare - https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html OMRN is a regex compiler that leverages Common Lisp's compiler to produce optimized assembly to match the given regex. It's incredibly fast. It does omit some features to achieve that, though.

For completeness, a critique of Uxn (and other "simpler" computing stacks): https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.html This HN discussion about this critique is also quite interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31705239 One of the replies is from Devine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31708175

A related project that might interest some people: https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare And the pretty hard to find blog post about it: https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html

> Jon and the authors of uxn commit a common fallacy in that they're chasing a brass ring of in-the-small performance metrics, getting it in the form of particular demonstrations, and then gradually accreting features to it until, most likely, they end up in a similar position to the old tech. The authors of this post note the same tendency with Gemini [1] and demonstrate that the clients are actually quite fat, much fatter than their rationale documents claim they should be. [1]: https://applied-langua.ge/posts/terminal-boredom.html

Well, there are lots of "do x" libs that I don't think a C programmer could easily copy, but hey, we're all Turing complete here... As for language features, historically Lisp was not always first for some particular feature, but because of earlier design decisions that still haven't been made by newer languages, it can usually implement innovative features from other languages or PL research papers as libraries without having to update the language spec or an implementation itself. So we have immutable collections, laziness, takes on pattern matching, various concurrency models, more sophisticated type systems... One very recent library that might be of interest is "just" a new regex library (https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html) but it leverages one unique design choice Lisp made in that you have access to the language's compiler at runtime, it's not a fenced-off separate program only used to create a runtime executable. The compiler can (and in SBCL's case does) optimize and produce assembly code, SIMD instructions can be used too, so this regex lib is very fast while not being that much code.