OpenLDK: Bringing the Java World into Common Lisp

Posted by atgreen 3 days ago

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Comments

Comment by mgdev 1 day ago

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in the world of LLMs, Lisp became the new lingua franca, because we don’t have to convince humans that parens are scary, and because it enables exactly this kind of magic.

Full circle for Lisp as an AI language.

Comment by atgreen 1 day ago

Hey, I'm the author. Yes, I worked in the University of Toronto's AI lab as a student many years ago, back when Lisp in AI was a thing. It definitely would be full circle!

Comment by jonhohle 1 day ago

LLMs can’t count. Do you think they can balance parens?

Personally, I’ve wondered why they don’t just generate machine code.

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Comment by shoobiedoo 1 day ago

I never thought of that. Humans avoid machine code for many reasons. If LLM's don't need to produce human-readable output, then why not?

Comment by __m 1 day ago

It would be architecture dependent

Comment by lmz 1 day ago

Well they could output plan.md files that are architecture independent first. Then we can commit those, and only generate the final machine code on demand.

Comment by SkiFire13 23 hours ago

That's a very good way to ensure your software is not reproducible.

People don't trust other people making little changes to existing software, who will ever be ok with rebuilding it from scratch?

Comment by lmz 18 hours ago

We could call the final phase a coLLMpiler for good measure.

Comment by sharts 22 hours ago

they can call tools to count tho?

Comment by rafram 1 day ago

I mean, is this an actual issue? There have to be plenty of developers using LLMs to write Lisp(s).

I have occasionally seen Claude models struggle to balance brackets/parens in nesting-heavy languages like Dart (Flutter), but it’s gotten much better.

Comment by mgdev 5 hours ago

Plus your agent (strictly speaking) doesn't need to generate parens as tokens. Instead they can generate imperative stack commands that manipulate the AST. Or something paredit-like.

Comment by Trusteando 1 day ago

I think OpenLDK allow you to use the Java world for sbcl when you don't want to use Clojure or ABCL. But using OpenLDK requires you to pay the interop cost and when speed of the java libraries is not a sharp constrain.

Comment by rjsw 1 day ago

Your "light mode" button doesn't work.

Comment by adrianmonk 1 day ago

That button makes the invisible scrollbar visible, though, which is great.

Comment by bjornroberg 1 day ago

I love lisp. I have fond memories of reading/studying Land of Lisp many years ago. Glad to see stuff like this being created.

Comment by yogthos 1 day ago

Incidentally, it looks like this idea also works with Jolt now. It's still in alpha stages, but works as a proof of concept. https://github.com/jlt-commons/jolt-openldk