Monday, August 2, 2010

Three Principles of Lisp

I've been thinking about what it is that still sets Lisp apart from all other dynamic languages. I've come to three core principles, that define what Lisp means for me.

Liberal use of syntactic abstraction

Lispers don't fret over when to build a domain-specific language (DSL) or not. When it makes sense, they build one, when it doesn't, they don't. Thanks to the trivial syntax, and the long experience with tools like pattern matching and quasiquotation, DSLs in Lisp are created rapidly.

In other languages, the creation of new language constructs or new languages requires countless hours of busy work. In Lisp, DSLs can be ready to use after a couple of lines entered at the REPL. In Lisp, creating DSLs is a no-brainer, and I think that's one of the cornerstones of Lisp.

Lisp isn't doctrinaire about creating DSLs - in fact it is standard advice to only use macros when plain functions won't do it anymore. But because creating DSLs in Lisp so easy, they are created whenever they make sense. Which, as it turns out, is a lot of times. I would go so far as to say that the liberal use syntactic abstraction makes Lisp a boilerplate-free language, but that's another topic.

There's no such thing as a constant mentality

Lisp thrives on interactivity. Newer languages like Haskell are encroaching on the natural habitat of Lisp (and surpass it some areas), but none of them can match Lisp when it comes to no holds barred, nitty gritty interactivity. Even defconstant isn't necessarily constant, and for interactive systems (Emacs!) that's exactly what you want. In an interactive system, you can't tolerate constancy - this would be like using Lego blocks that are glued together.

I think a fundamental insight for understanding Lisp's superiority in the interactive domain is that Lisp is an asynchronous language, in a very peculiar sense: any Lisp expression may be entered at any time. In many cases, you could cut up a Lisp source file at top-level expression boundaries, rearrange them, and the resulting source file would still have exactly the same effects as the original file when loaded into a Lisp. (Just as one example, in Common Lisp it's possible to create subclasses of classes that don't exist yet.)

This is simply a natural consequence of making the read-eval-print loop (REPL) the cornerstone of Lisp semantics. In C, the dominant paradigm is main(), in Lisp it's (repl). And the top-level is tricky, some say hopeless. In Lisp, it is fundamental to always be able to define a function FOO that calls an as-yet undefined other top-level function BAR - a fundamental idiom of interactivity:
(defun foo ()
Toolchain approach

Lispers don't need to create a new language to try out new language design ideas. Many times, new languages can be defined as macros. If they don't, and an interpreter or compiler is needed, it can still stand on the shoulders of Lisp. In the Lisp world, new languages are built buy combining large, battle-tested building blocks, and polishing or updating them when needed, instead of starting over from toothpicks and double-sided duct tape. A large Lisp like Common Lisp is like a toolchain of decades-old tools that have proven their worth, and have been codified in standards, folklore, and implementations.

Now of course, that's also true of other languages. But in other languages, starting a new language is a from-scratch affair. And on the long way of parsing, analyzing, and interpreting or compiling language constructs, the creator of the new language invariably introduces a lot of things that are different from other languages, so every new non-Lisp language is often fundamentally different from other languages, in subtle areas such as control flow or scoping, which requires decades of fixing.

In Lisp, new tools are tried out as separate functions, macros, DSLs, subsystems, or, in the extreme case, code walkers or complete new implementations. The rest of the language stays the same. Even a new Lisp implementation will often share a lot of the design space with other Lisps. And that's the reason Lisp had proper lexical scoping for decades, while it's just become a fixture in new languages, and that's also why Scheme now has hygienic macros and phase separation, and other languages will have them in decades - because in Lisp, all of these new constructs can be developed in the Lisp fabric, without rebooting the process every time. Which turns out as a nice metaphor:

Others reboot, Lisp keeps running.


RBerenguel said...

It feels like these three reasons would also work (at a much lower level) with Forth. I have just a working knowledge of Forth (and not much of it, anyway). I'm better at Lisp, although never had to create a DSL.


J said...

How do I stop my head from exploding "when a macro expression expands to code that itself contains macros, which themselves are expanded to code that contains further macros"?

Manuel J. Simoni said...

@J That happens all the time in Lisp, and is not more troubling than a "function that calls code that itself contains functions, which themselves contain code that contains futher functions".