Claus Brod: Should Lisp programmers be slapped in public? (17 Jan 2006)

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---+++ [[BlogOnSoftware20060117][Should Lisp programmers be slapped in public?]] (17.1.2006)

After fixing a nasty bug today, I let off some steam by surfing
the 'net for fun stuff and new developments.
For instance, Bjarne Stroustrup recently reported on
[[http://www.artima.com/cppsource/cpp0x.html][the plans for C++0x]].
I like most of the stuff he presents, but still was left disturbingly
unimpressed with it. Maybe it's just a sign of age, but
somehow I am not really thrilled anymore by a programming language standard
scheduled for 2008 which, for the first time in the history of the
language, includes something as basic as a 
[[http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/latest-doxygen/classstd_1_1tr1_1_1unordered__map.html][hashtable]].

Yes, I know that pretty much all the major STL implementations already
have hashtable equivalents, so it's not a real issue in practice. And yes,
there are other very interesting [[http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1886.pdf][concepts]]
in the standard which make a lot of sense.
Still - I used to be a C++ bigot, but I feel the zeal is wearing off;
is that love affair over?

Confused and bewildered, I surf some other direction, but only to have Sriram
Krishnan explain to me
that [[http://blogs.msdn.com/sriram/archive/2006/01/15/lisp_is_sin.aspx][Lisp is sin]].
Oh great. I happen to like Lisp a lot - do I really deserve another slap in the face
on the same day?

But Sriram doesn't really flame us Lisp geeks; quite to the contrary.
He is a programmer at Microsoft and
obviously strongly impressed by Lisp as a language. His blog entry illustrates
how Lisp influenced recent developments in C# - and looks at reasons why Lisp
isn't as successful as many people think it should be.

Meanwhile, back in the C++ jungle: Those _concepts_ are actually quite clever,
and solve an important problem in using C++ templates.

In a way, C++ templates use what elsewhere is called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing][duck typing]]. Why do I
say this? Because the types passed to a template are checked implicitly
by the template implementation rather than its declaration. If the
template implementation says <tt>f = 0</tt> and =f= is a template
parameter, then the template assumes that =f= provides an assignment
operator - otherwise the code simply won't compile. (The difference
to _duck typing_ in its original sense is that we're talking about
compile-time checks here, not dynamic function call resolution at run-time.)

Hence, templates do not require types to derive from certain classes or
interfaces, which is particularly important when using templates for primitive
types (such as =int= or =float=). However, when the type check fails,
you'll drown in error messages which are cryptic enough to violate
the Geneva convention. To fix the error, the user of a template often
has to inspect the implementation of the template to understand
what's going on. Not exactly what they call encapsulation.

Generics in .NET improve on this by specifying constraints explicitly:
<verbatim>
  static void Foobar<T>(IFun<T> fun) where T : IFunny<T>
  {
    ... function definition ...
  }
</verbatim>

=T= is required to implement =IFunny=. If it doesn't, the compiler will
tell you that =T= ain't funny at all, and that's that. No need to dig
into the implementation details of the generic function.

C++ concepts extend this idea: You can specify pretty arbitrary restrictions
on the type. An example from Stroustrup's and Dos Reis' [[http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1886.pdf][paper]]:

<verbatim>
  concept Assignable<typename T, typename U=T> {
    Var<T> a;
    Var<const U> b;
    a = b;
  };

  ;; using this in a template definition:
  template <typename T, typename U>
    where Assignable<T, U>
  ... template definition ...
</verbatim>

So if =T= and =U= fit into the =Assignable= concept, the compiler will
accept them as parameters of the template. This is cute: In true C++
tradition, this provides maximum flexibility and performance,
but solves the original problem.

Still, that C# code is much easier on the eye...

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