andai21 hours ago
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34908067
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9602430
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406325
Also this comment:
> "Lush" stands for "Lisp Universal Shell". It has not just S-expression syntax but recursion, setq, dynamic typing, quoting of S-expressions and thus lists and homoiconicity, cons, car, cdr, let*, cond, progn, runtime code evaluation, serialization (though bread/bwrite rather than read/print), and readmacros. Its object system is based on CLOS.
ngriffiths20 hours ago
Makes me curious what state R was at the time, or whatever else could've been useful for deep learning, and the benefits of a new language vs adapting something that exists. Seems like it was a big investment
antononcube20 hours ago
R and its ecosystem have some unbeatable features, but, generally speaking, the "old", base R is too arcane to be widely useful. Also, being "made by statisticians for statisticians" should be a big warning sign.
_Wintermute18 hours ago
In my opinion R should thought of as an unbeatable graphical calculator, but an awful programming language.
williamcotton15 hours ago
The tinyverse collection of packages makes things a lot more sane, IMO:
penguins <- read_csv("penguins.csv") |>
na.omit() |>
select(species, island, bill_length_mm, body_mass_g) |>
group_by(species, island) |>
summarize(
mean_bill_length = mean(bill_length_mm),
mean_mass = mean(body_mass_g),
n = n()
) |>
arrange(species, desc(mean_bill_length))
penguins |>
ggplot(aes(x = species, y = mean_bill_length, fill = island)) +
geom_col(position = "dodge") +
labs(
title = "Mean Bill Length by Species and Island",
y = "Mean Bill Length (mm)"
) +
theme_minimal()_Wintermutean hour ago
True, but trying to wrap any of that into a function rather than simple scripts makes you delve into the ever-deprecated API for non-standard evaluation.
currymj12 hours ago
i would compare base R to basically a shell. meant to be used interactively. okay for small scripts. you can write big programs but it will get weird.
alpinesol13 hours ago
Fun fact: Lush was invented by Yann LeCun, of convnet and FAIR fame.
knighthacka day ago
What does 'small' really mean?
I would think of a language like Go as small (say, in comparison to Rust or Swift) - the language itself at least, if you discount the standard library.
I find the use of the word 'small' quite confusing.
jerf20 hours ago
The author appears to be defining it in terms of the effort put in to the language, basically, person-hours.
Go may be a small language by some definitions (and as my phrasing implies, perhaps not by others), but it is certainly one that has had a lot of person-hours put into it.
emmanueloga_20 hours ago
The problem is that there's no universal definition of "small" when it comes to languages.
An article on the Brown PLT blog [1] suggests analyzing languages by defining a core language and a desugaring function. A small core simplifies reasoning and analysis but can lead to verbose desugaring if features expand into many constructs. The boundary between the core and sugared language is flexible, chosen by designers, and reflects a balance between expressiveness and surface simplicity.
Feature complexity can be evaluated by desugaring: concise mappings to the core suggest simplicity, while verbose or intricate desugarings indicate complexity.
So, a possible definition of a "small" language could be one with both a small core and a minimal desugaring function.
--
1: https://blog.brownplt.org/2016/01/08/slimming-languages.html
cannibalXxxa day ago
do you already program with this language? what is your paradigm?
kgwgk21 hours ago
“Already”?
This is about a language abandoned 15 years ago!
andai21 hours ago
It's buried in the article, but Lush is from 1987!
kgwgk20 hours ago
SN(1987) neural network simulator for AmigaOS (Leon Bottou, Yann LeCun)
|
SN1(1988) ported to SunOS. added shared-weight neural nets and graphics (LeCun)
| \
| SN1.3(1989) commercial version for Unix (Neuristique)
| /
SN2(1990) new lisp interpreter and graphic functions (Bottou)
| \
| SN2.2(1991) commercial version (Neuristique)
| |
| SN2.5(1991) ogre GUI toolkit (Neuristique)
| / \
\ / SN2.8(1993+) enhanced version (Neuristique)
| \
| TL3(1993+) lisp interpreter for Unix and Win32 (Neuristique)
| [GPL]
| \_______________________________________________
| |
SN27ATT(1991) custom AT&T version |
| (LeCun, Bottou, Simard, AT&T Labs) |
| |
SN3(1992) IDX matrix engine, Lisp->C compiler/loader and |
| gradient-based learning library |
| (Bottou, LeCun, AT&T) |
| |
SN3.1(1995) redesigned compiler, added OpenGL and SGI VL |
| support (Bottou, LeCun, Simard, AT&T Labs) |
| |
SN3.2(2000) hardened/cleanup SN3.x code, |
| added SDL support (LeCun) |
| _______________________________________________________|
|/
|
ATTLUSH(2001) merging of TL3 interpreter + SN3.2 compiler
[GPL] and libraries (Bottou, LeCun, AT&T Labs).
|
LUSH(2002) rewrote the compiler/loader (Bottou, NEC Research Institute)
[GPL]
|
LUSH(2002) rewrote library, documentation, and interfaced packages
[GPL] (LeCun, Huang-Fu, NEC)
peagreen12 hours ago
I love this diagram. Is there a tool that generates such things? Or is there a name for this style of diagram that I could search for?
My prime use would be generating diagrams of function call chains in large Python code bases.
fraserphysics19 hours ago
Where does Ralf Juengling's work on lush fit in to this picture?
kgwgk19 hours ago
Note that the diagram ends in 2002.
[deleted]20 hours agocollapsed
revskill20 hours ago
[flagged]
anonzzzies20 hours ago
And that's related to someone liking a language how? Especially one that's dead for a lot time...
Not to mention; you seem to be religiously pushing react which is more of a dsl but still..
revskill20 hours ago
You mean what do i mean and what do you mean ? Thanks.