Comment by 0x20cowboy
16 hours ago
So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.
16 hours ago
So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.
Can't agree more. Lisp was discovered/invented for the purpose of AI research. Of course, modern neural nets and transformers is a big departure from McCarthy's vision of AI - logical, interpretable, symbolic. However, if the current wave of AI hits a wall - and many serious researchers think it will, or already has at the margins - there's growing interest in neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural nets with symbolic reasoning. That's closer to McCarthy's original vision, and Lisps are genuinely well-suited for it.
Let's be honest: Lisp probably won't ever get bigger than Python, unless Python for whatever reason starts dying on its own. But if AI ever gets serious about interpretability, formal reasoning, program synthesis - all the stuff Lisp was built for - it just might quietly become relevant again in research contexts, without ever reclaiming mainstream status.
Scicloj has been building out a serious ML stack in Clojure - noj, metamorph.ml, scicloj.ml.tribuo, libpython-clj for Python interop. Beside that, people been proving that 'code is data' is exactly what makes it a better target for LLMs. Clojure is most token efficient PL - it's been proven. There are some recent interesting clj projects in relevance:
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https://github.com/realgenekim/clj-surgeon
https://clojure.getpando.ai
https://github.com/yogthos/chiasmus
Clojure? Forget it, SBCL would be better for that task. Just look what could be done with Coalton.
Well, this is because "normal" programming languages are one step above AST. So LLM has to work with program text, which is much easier than regular human text, as it is constrained to well defined number of keywords and grammar, but still this is pretty variable. Lisp is just AST, so it is one level lower. I guess that at some point LLM-s will stop writing human-readable code, as this is additional obstacle, they will work directly with binaries or virtual machines code (like in Java), because this will be easier and eat less tokens.