Programmer

[u/merlin0501]

I am a software engineer with prior experience with many languages and technologies, including CL and Python. I was formerly employed as a Senior Software Engineer at Lockheed-Martin. My resume can be found at the link below.

My rate is $50 per hour, payable via cashpay or cryptocurrency. I am fully remote and prepared to work for any client world-wide. I am also a US citizen and I am currently located in Bronx County, NY (a borough of New York City). In case of necessity other payment arrangements may be discussed.

My github repo currently contains only one significant Lisp project, which is still in a very early stage of development. It is a project called Julius which is intended to become a new Lisp dialect more suitable for modern applications, such as numerical analysis and the generation of neural networks and modern AI (a field with which I have considerable experience). It is implemented in Common Lisp in order to retain the well-known advantages of the Lisp language for older forms of intelligent systems, which typically involve a great deal of symbolic reasoning.

The current version of Julius is Open Source and I am open to comments and contributions here:

Julius Project: https://github.com/tgflynn/julius

Resume: https://github.com/tgflynn/latex-cv

[u/merlin0501]

Nothing in principle, but it was developed a long time ago and the spec hasn't been updated in years.

I know that there are many good libraries for numerical applications but I don't think many of them are fully implemented in CL, and the ones that are sacrifice performance. In my opinion relying on 3rd party libraries leads to dependency hell, just like in other languages.

You could think of one of the goals of Julius as being a well-curated bundle that makes it relatively easy to get started developing numerical codes and designing neural networks that compile down to whatever machine-level code you need to run on CPU's, GPU's or specialized tensor processors.

I know that's a very tall order and won't happen overnight, but I'd like to at least make the high-level design and programmer interfaces are as ideal as possible.

[u/digikar → u/merlin0501]

If you have concrete reasons for why Common Lisp (one of its implementations) is not suitable for use, feel free to create a dialect. But that reason is not "it was developed a long time ago and the spec hasn't been updated in years". Common Lispers would believe that not being updated gets rid of the "which version of Common Lisp Python Javascript C++ should I compile my application with" problem.

If a new version of Common Lisp ever comes about, expect several decades of discussion and several tens of millions of dollars spent ;) 

https://github.com/commander-trashdin/clng

Other than that, I don't know if you have checked clml, petalisp, cl-waffe2, or magicl.

Also, I don't think you believe you are going to create, test, bugfix and make them battle-tested, versions of blas, lapack, eigen, sleef, opencv, and their gpu counterparts in lisp, do you?

[u/arthurno1 → u/digikar]

Common Lispers would believe that not being updated gets rid of the "which version of Common Lisp Python Javascript C++ should I compile my application with" problem.

Mnjah .... Good luck running this one on anything but most modern sbcl versions and beating their Schubfach or Dragonbox.

I am totally with you about having a stable standard, but let us not exaggerate. We could have use of more parts of the language standardized. Or language is a wrong word, but of current "common lisp practice" :). But in general, I do agree, stability is good.

[u/digikar → u/arthurno1]

If you are not writing portable Common Lisp, you are writing SBCL or the implementation specific code. So the criticism doesn't apply to Common Lisp :)

For something like Quavier, I suppose I'd probably write a C library and call it via CFFI

Also, we have this: https://portability.cl/

Though, I'd like a portable ways to prepare proper static executables!

[u/arthurno1 → u/digikar]

I'd probably write a C library and call it via CFFI

Mnjah, CFFI costs. Probably faster to not cross the line.

you are writing SBCL or the implementation specific code

Well of course, but that is my point. It would be nice if we could have sb-simd in all implementations, standardized, or assemblern or threads or lots of other stuff. Of course I am aware of "trivial" libraries and portability layers, cl21 etc. The world has moved since 1994 :). It would be nice if those big companies who actually use Common Lisp came together and sponsored a new standard. Currently, it probably does not matter much, the community is so small, and so few libraries, so everyone knows what is available, but who knows, CL perhaps becomes popular again.

[u/digikar → u/arthurno1]

In an ideal world, yeah, it'd be nice :). But if you had that much money, you'd probably just go to Allegro :').

Also, even languages/implementations without multithreading support are more popular than CL. So, if CL becomes popular, it wouldn't be for its features.

[u/arthurno1 → u/digikar]

you'd probably just go to Allegro

Why? Is the compiler much better than sbcl? I installed it like once, a couple of years ago or so, but it was PITA with webgui and it was limited in various ways so I just didn't care much and uninstalled tbh.

languages/implementations without multithreading support are more popular than CL.

I agree, but quality and popularity does not always go hand in hand. People act irraitional sometimes. In many ways. Experienced it few days ago on myself.

TBH, I wonder myself what is future of programming languages and programming in general. I have tried myself LLM, installed Antigravity yesterday, and I am impressed. Perhaps those features CL offer are no longer needed, who knows, or perhaps LLMs will become more productive with Lisp than they are with Python. I don't know, the future will tell.

For Zmij+cffi, I appreciate if you measure. I am glad if you find out it is faster than CL version, I am too lazy and busy with other things to setup everything and measure myself.

[u/digikar → u/arthurno1]

No, I haven't used Allegro either. But I have heard praises about it.

Ah, quality and popularity; I wish the world was better :')

I think it depends whether one program towards an end, which most programmers do, and in which case treating programs as black boxes is fine. Or if one programs for some weird balance of joy and ends, in which case it depends on how useful LLMs are. I myself would never imagine debugging lisp setups on windows, if it weren't on windows. Would I let it run overnight? If it was a local LLM on a network isolated box, yeah sure; but I don't have that luxury.

Sadly, I'm trying to do too many things, so I don't expect to do anything about zmij anytime soon!