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TheTheTheThe NatureNatureNatureNature ofofofof LispLispLispLisp Monday, May 8, 2006 IntroductionIntroductionIntroductionIntroduction When I first stumbled into Lisp advocacy on various corners of the web I was already an experienced programmer. At that point I had grokked what seemed at the time a wide range of programming languages. I was proud to have the usual suspects (C++, Java, C#, etc.) on my service record and was under impression that I knew everything there is to know about programming languages. I couldn't have possibly been more wrong. My initial attempt to learn Lisp came to a crashing halt as soon as I saw some sample code. I suppose the same thought ran through my mind that ran through thousands of other minds who were ever in my shoes: "Why on Earth would anyone want to use a language with such horrific syntax?!" I couldn't be bothered to learn a language if its creators couldn't be bothered to give it a pleasant syntax. After all, I was almost blinded by the infamous Lisp parentheses! The moment I regained my sight I communicated my frustrations to some members of the Lisp sect. Almost immediately I was bombarded by a standard set of responses: Lisp's parentheses are only a superficial matter, Lisp has a huge benefit of code and data being expressed in the same manner (which, obviously, is a huge improvement over XML), Lisp has tremendously powerful metaprogramming facilities that allow programs to write code and modify themselves, Lisp allows for creation of mini-languages specific to the problem at hand, Lisp blurs the distinction between run time and compile time, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp... The list was very impressive. Needless to say none of it made sense. Nobody could illustrate the usefulness of these features with specific examples because these techniques are supposedly only useful in large software systems. After many hours of debating that conventional programming languages do the job just fine, I gave up. I wasn't about to invest months into learning a language with a terrible syntax in order to understand obscure features that had no useful examples. My time has not yet come. For many months the Lisp advocates pressed on. I was baffled. Many extremely intelligent people I knew and had much respect for were praising Lisp with almost religious dedication. There had to be something there, something I couldn't afford not to get my hands on! Eventually my thirst for knowledge won me over. I took the plunge, bit the bullet, got my hands dirty, and began months of mind bending exercises. It was a journey on an endless lake of frustration. I turned my mind inside out, rinsed it, and put it back in place. I went through seven rings of hell and came back. And then I got it. The enlightenment came instantaneously. One moment I understood nothing, and the next moment everything clicked into place. I've achieved nirvana. Dozens of times I heard Eric Raymond's statement quoted by different people: "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." I never understood this statement. I never believed it could be true. And finally, after all the pain, it made sense! There was more truth to it than I ever could have imagined. I've achieved an almost divine state of mind, an instantaneous enlightenment experience that turned my view of computer science on its head in less than a single second. That very second I became a member of the Lisp cult. I felt something a ninjitsu master must feel: I had to spread my newfound knowledge to at least ten lost souls in the course of my lifetime. I took the usual path. I was rehashing the same arguments that were given to me for years (only now they actually made sense!), hoping to convert unsuspecting bystanders. It didn't work. My persistence sparked a few people's interest but their curiosity dwindled at the mere sight of sample Lisp code. Perhaps years of advocacy would forge a few new Lispers, but I wasn't satisfied. There had to be a better way. I gave the matter careful thought. Is there something inherently hard about Lisp that prevents very intelligent, experienced programmers from understanding it? No, there isn't. After all, I got it, and if I can do it, anybody can. Then what is it that makes Lisp so hard to understand? The answer, as such things usually do, came unexpectedly. Of course! Teaching anybody anything involves building advanced concepts on top of concepts they already understand! If the process is made interesting and the matter is explained properly the new concepts become as intuitive as the original building blocks that aided their understanding. That was the problem! Metaprogramming, code and data in one representation, self-modifying programs, domain specific mini-languages, none of the explanations for these concepts referenced familiar territory. How could I expect anyone to understand them! No wonder people wanted specific examples. I could as well have been speaking in Martian! I shared my ideas with fellow Lispers. "Well, of course these concepts aren't explained in terms of familiar territory", they said. "They are so different, they're unlike anything these people have learned before." This was a poor excuse. "I do not believe this to be true", I said. The response was unanimous: "Why don't you give it a try?" So I did. This article is a product of my efforts. It is my attempt to explain Lisp in familiar, intuitive concepts. I urge brave souls to read on. Grab your favorite drink. Take a deep breath. Prepare to be blown away. Oh, and may the Force be with you. XMLXMLXMLXMLReloadedReloadedReloadedReloaded A thousand mile journey starts with a single step. A journey to enlightenment is no exception and our first step just happens to be XML. What more could possibly be said about XML that hasn't already been said? It turns out, quite a bit. While there's nothing particularly interesting about XML itself, its relationship to Lisp is fascinating. XML is the all too familiar concept that Lisp advocates need so much. It is our bridge to conveying understanding to regular programmers. So let's revive the dead horse, take out the stick, and venture into XML wilderness that no one dared venture into before us. It's time to see the all too familiar moon from the other side. Superficially XML is nothing more than a standardized syntax used to express arbitrary hierarchical data in human readable form. To-do lists, web pages, medical records, auto insurance claims, configuration files are all examples of potential XML use. Let's use a simple to-do list as an example (in a couple of sections you'll see it in a whole new light): Clean the house. Wash the dishes. Buy more soap. What happens if we unleash our favorite XML parser on this to-do list? Once the data is parsed, how is it represented in memory? The most natural representation is, of course, a tree - a perfect data structure for hierarchical data. After all is said and done, XML is really just a tree serialized to a human readable form. Anything that can be represented in a tree can be represented in XML and vice versa. I hope you understand this idea. It's very important for what's coming next. Let's take this a little further. What other type of data is often represented as a tree? At this point the list is as good as infinite so I'll give you a hint at what I'm getting at - try to remember your old compiler course. If you have a vague recollection that source code is stored in a tree after it's parsed, you're on the right track. Any compiler inevitably parses the source code into an abstract syntax tree. This isn't surprising since source code is hierarchical: functions contain arguments and blocks of code. Blocks of code contain expressions and statements. Expressions contain variables and operators. And so it goes. Let's apply our corollary that any tree can easily be serialized into XML to this idea. If all source code is eventually represented as a tree, and any tree can be serialized into XML, then all source code can be converted to XML, right? Let's illustrate this interesting property by a simple example. Consider the function below: int add(int arg1, int arg2) { return arg1 + arg2; } Can you convert this function definition to its XML equivalent? Turns out, it's reasonably simple. Naturally there are many ways to do this. Here is one way the resulting XML can look like: arg1 arg2 We can go through this relatively simple exercise with any language. We can turn any source code into XML, and we can transform the resulting XML back to original source code.We can write a converter that turns Java into XML and a converter that turns XML back to Java. We could do the same for C++. (In case you're wondering if anyone is crazy enough to do it, take a look at GCC-XML). Furthermore, for languages that share common features but use different syntax (which to some extent is true about mostmainstream languages) we could convert source code from one language to another using XML as an intermediary representation. We could use our Java2XML converter to convert a Java program to XML. We could then run an XML2CPP converter on the resulting XML and turn it into C++ code.With any luck (if we avoid using features of Java that don't exist in C++) we'll get a working C++ program. Neat, eh? All this effectively means that we can use XML for generic storage of source code. We'd be able to create a whole class of programming languages that use uniform syntax, as well as write transformers that convert existing source code to XML. If we were to actually adopt this idea, compilers for different languages wouldn't need to implement parsers for their specific grammars - they'd simply use an XML parser to turn XML directly into an abstract syntax tree. By now you're probably wondering why I've embarked on the XML crusade and what it has to do with Lisp (after all, Lisp was created about thirty years before XML). I promise that everything will become clear soon enough. But before we take our second step, let's go through a small philosophical exercise. Take a good look at the XML version of our "add" function above. How would you classify it? Is it data or code? If you think about it for a moment you'll realize that there are good reasons to put this XML snippet into both categories. It's XML and it's just information encoded in a standardized format. We've already determined that it can be generated from a tree data structure in memory (that's effectively what GCC-XML does). It's lying around in a file with no apparent way to execute it. We can parse it into a tree of XML nodes and do various transformations on it. It's data. But wait a moment! When all is said and done it's the same "add" function written with a different syntax, right? Once parsed, its tree could be fed into a compiler and we could execute it. We could easily write a small interpreter for this XML code and we could execute it directly. Alternatively, we could transform it into Java or C++ code, compile it, and run it. It's code. So, where are we? Looks like we've just arrived to an interesting point. A concept that has traditionally been so hard to understand is now amazingly simple and intuitive. Code is also always data! Does it mean that data is also always code? As crazy as this sounds this very well might be the case. Remember how I promised that you'll see our to-do list in a whole new light? Let me reiterate on that promise. But we aren't ready to discuss this just yet. For now let's continue walking down our path. A little earlier I mentioned that we could easily write an interpreter to execute our XML snippet of the add function. Of course this sounds like a purely theoretical exercise. Who in their right mind would want to do that for practical purposes?Well, it turns out quite a few people would disagree. You've likely encountered and used their work at least once in your career, too. Do I have you out on the edge of your seat? If so, let's move on! AntAntAntAnt ReloadedReloadedReloadedReloaded Now that we've made the trip to the dark side of the moon, let's not leave quite yet. We may still learn something by exploring it a little more, so let's take another step. We begin by closing our eyes and remembering a cold rainy night in the winter of 2000. A prominent developer by the name of James Duncan Davidson1 was hacking his way through Tomcat servlet container. As the time came to build the changes he carefully saved all his files and ran make. Errors. Lots of errors. Something was wrong. After careful examination James exclaimed: "Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab?!" Indeed, this was the problem. Again. James has had enough. He could sense the full moon through the clouds and it made him adventurous. He created a fresh Java project and quickly hacked together a simple but surprisingly useful utility. This spark of genius used Java property files for information on how to build the project. James could now write the equivalent of the makefile in a nice format without worrying about the damned spaces ever again. His utility did all the hard work by interpreting the property file and taking appropriate actions to build the project. It was neat. Another Neat Tool. Ant. After using Ant to build Tomcat for a few months it became clear that Java property files are not sufficient to express complicated build instructions. Files needed to be checked out, copied, compiled, sent to another machine, and unit tested. In case of failure e-mails needed to be sent out to appropriate people. In case of success "Bad to the Bone" needed to be played at the highest possible volume. At the end of the track volume had to be restored to its original level. Yes, Java property files didn't cut it anymore. James needed a more flexible solution. He didn't feel like writing his own parser (especially since he wanted an industry standard solution). XML seemed like a reasonable alternative. In a couple of days Ant was ported to XML. It was the best thing since sliced bread. So how does Ant work? It's pretty simple. It takes an XML file with specific build instructions (you decide if they're data or code) and interprets them by running specialized Java code for each XML element. It's actually much simpler than it sounds. A simple XML instruction like the one below causes a Java class with an equivalent name to be loaded and its code to be executed. The snippet above copies a source directory to a destination directory. Ant locates a "copy" task (a Java class, really), sets appropriate parameters (todir and fileset) by calling appropriate Java methods and then executes the task. Ant comes with a set of core tasks and anyone can extend it with tasks of their own simply by writing Java classes that follow certain conventions. Ant finds these classes and executes them whenever XML elements with appropriate names are encountered. Pretty simple. Effectively Ant accomplishes what we were talking about in the previous section: it acts as an interpreter for a language that uses XML as its syntax by translating XML elements to appropriate Java instructions. We could write an "add" task and have Ant execute it when it encounters the XML snippet for addition presented in the previous section! Considering that Ant is an extremely popular project, the ideas presented in the previous section start looking more sane. After all, they're being used every day in what probably amounts to thousands of companies! So far I've said nothing about why Ant actually goes through all the trouble of interpreting XML. Don't try to look for the answer on its website either - you'll find nothing of value. Nothing relevant to our discussion, anyway. Let's take another step. It's time to find out why. WhyWhyWhyWhy XML?XML?XML?XML? Sometimes right decisions are made without full conscious understanding of all the issues involved. I'm not sure if James knew why he chose XML - it was likely a subconscious decision. At the very least, the reasons I saw on Ant's website for using XML are all the wrong reasons. It appears that the main concerns revolved around portability and extensibility. I fail to see how XML helps advance these goals in Ant's case. What is the advantage of using interpreted XML over simple Java source code?Why not create a set of classes with a nice API for commonly used tasks (copying directories, compiling, etc.) and using those directly from Java source code? This would run on every platform that runs Java (which Ant requires anyway), it's infinitely extensible, and it has the benefit of having a more pleasant, familiar syntax. So why XML? Can we find a good reason for using it? It turns out that we can (although as I mentioned earlier I'm not sure if James was consciously aware of it). XML has the property of being far more flexible in terms of introduction of semantic constructs than Java could ever hope to be. Don't worry, I'mnot falling into the trap of using big words to describe incomprehensible concepts. This is actually a relatively simple idea, though it may take some effort to explain. Buckle your seat-belt. We're about to make a giant leap towards achieving nirvana. How can we represent 'copy' example above in Java code? Here's one way to do it: CopyTask copy = new CopyTask(); Fileset fileset = new Fileset(); fileset.setDir("src_dir"); copy.setToDir("../new/dir"); copy.setFileset(fileset); copy.execute(); The code is almost the same, albeit a little longer than the original XML. So what's different? The answer is that the XML snippet introduces a special semantic construct for copying. If we could do it in Java it would look like this: copy("../new/dir") { fileset("src_dir"); } Can you see the difference? The code above (if it were possible in Java) is a special operator for copying files - similar to a for loop or a new foreach construct introduced in Java 5. If we had an automatic converter from XML to Java it would likely produce the above gibberish. The reason for this is that Java's accepted syntax tree grammar is fixed by the language specification - we have no way of modifying it. We can add packages, classes, methods, but we cannot extend Java to make addition of new operators possible. Yet we can do it to our heart's content in XML - its syntax tree isn't restricted by anything except our interpreter! If the idea is still unclear, consider introducing a special operator 'unless' to Java: unless(someObject.canFly()) { someObject.transportByGround(); } In the previous two examples we extend the Java language to introduce an operator for copying files and a conditional operator unless. We would do this by modifying the abstract syntax tree grammar that Java compiler accepts. Naturally we cannot do it with standard Java facilities, but we can easily do it in XML. Because our XML interpreter parses the abstract syntax tree that results from it, we can extend it to include any operator we like. For complex operators this ability provides tremendous benefits. Can you imagine writing special operators for checking out source code, compiling files, running unit testing, sending email? Try to come up with some. If you're dealing with a specialized problem (in our case it's building projects) these operators can do wonders to decrease the amount of code you have to type and to