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> mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL ... you'd have to focus on attracting new users It's my observation that CL regularly attracts new users, who grumb

by dwc 11y ago

> mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL ... you'd have to focus on attracting new users It's my observation that CL regularly attracts new users, who grumble a bit at first and then fall in love. Then they drift away to other langs, keeping an affection for sexps, macros, and the numerous elegant aspects of CL. But drift away they do. IMO, if CL could keep more of the people who learn it well enough to love it, then it would be thriving. I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time.

ScottBurson 11y ago
> I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time. I would like to hear them nonetheless.
- dwc 11y ago
  I would rather not say until I've thought it out some more. A bag of mushy thoughts with a grain of truth in them would probably be provocative and wouldn't provide much utility for the CL community. Instead, here's one of the things that started me thinking about this... Some years back, Xach created the library manager Quicklisp, filling a huge hole in the lisp ecosystem. It's nice work and quickly became the defacto standard. Lots good to say about it and nothing bad, really. The thing that got me thinking was that this actually needed to be done at the time Xach did it. CL had been around a long time officially and even longer unofficially, and this really important piece of infrastructure had not been done. How could that be? "How could that be?" leads to more questions, and possible answers, and some loose ideas about moving forward. That's where I'm at, and I don't want to say more until I have something concrete and constructive. I wouldn't mind having a speculative conversation (that would help me greatly), but I think throwing out half baked ideas would do nothing more than the existing corpus of "why lisp isn't successful" blog posts, so I don't want to have that conversation somewhere like HN.
mvc 11y ago
This is pretty close to my story. Had a lot of fun programming CL. Even worked with "His Kennyness" and Hans Huebner for a while. But I was young and needed to experience different dev cultures so I went and did some Rails for a while. I dream of meeting someone who wants to build something like mesos on top of cells.

by dwc 11y ago

ScottBurson 11y ago

> I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time. I would like to hear them nonetheless.

dwc 11y ago
I would rather not say until I've thought it out some more. A bag of mushy thoughts with a grain of truth in them would probably be provocative and wouldn't provide much utility for the CL community. Instead, here's one of the things that started me thinking about this... Some years back, Xach created the library manager Quicklisp, filling a huge hole in the lisp ecosystem. It's nice work and quickly became the defacto standard. Lots good to say about it and nothing bad, really. The thing that got me thinking was that this actually needed to be done at the time Xach did it. CL had been around a long time officially and even longer unofficially, and this really important piece of infrastructure had not been done. How could that be? "How could that be?" leads to more questions, and possible answers, and some loose ideas about moving forward. That's where I'm at, and I don't want to say more until I have something concrete and constructive. I wouldn't mind having a speculative conversation (that would help me greatly), but I think throwing out half baked ideas would do nothing more than the existing corpus of "why lisp isn't successful" blog posts, so I don't want to have that conversation somewhere like HN.

mvc 11y ago

This is pretty close to my story. Had a lot of fun programming CL. Even worked with "His Kennyness" and Hans Huebner for a while. But I was young and needed to experience different dev cultures so I went and did some Rails for a while. I dream of meeting someone who wants to build something like mesos on top of cells.