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I'll cons this onto my list of reasons why Lisp "failed". Other explanations are: Worse is Better: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.j

I'll cons this onto my list of reasons why Lisp "failed". Other explanations are: Worse is Better: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html The Bipolar Lisp Programmer: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/eicqvm3GXiE https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/eicqv... The Lisp Curse: http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html Where Lisp Fails: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 Lisp is still my language of choice. I'm more productive in it than other languages (C, Java), not because I know the other languages less well, but because they're less expressive. So, for me, Lisp fixes the world. Why aren't people using it? There are three things often missed. (1) People's choice of programming languages perhaps isn't as rational as they might like to believe. There's a large amount of personal taste involved. For a personal project, that's no barrier, you can use your favourite language, but if you're working with a dozen other people, Lisp is unlikely to be adopted because more people on the team will prefer Java, C++, or Python. Multiply over all the commercial projects and you can see why you can't build a career around Lisp programming. (2) There are accidents of history. When DEC decided to discontinue the PDP-10, the days of the hacker community built around it were numbered. Those involved then went on to build Lisp machines, but they were undercut by cheaper, commodity hardware which ran Unix. Then, the AI winter arrived. It was bad for Lisp, but Prolog fared far worse. (3) Linguistic relativity. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might be dubious for natural language, but for programming languages it certainly does apply. If you're uncomfortable with Lisp, you won't be tackling problems at which Lisp excels, or (at best) you'll do them in a completely different way, and it will take you longer. The result is that people think their language of choice is fine for everything that matters, and the problems they don't tackle don't matter to them.

hga 10y ago
(2) There are accidents of history. When DEC decided to discontinue the PDP-10, the days of the hacker community built around it were numbered. Those involved then went on to build Lisp machines... Nit on this bit of history: the PDP-6/10/Decsystem 20 architecture was a dead end due to its maximum address space of 1 MiB (of 9 bit bytes), but was still a very healthy line of computers when the Lisp Machine effort started circa 1974, about a decade before DEC dumped the whole line, then a 100 million a year business (a lot of us looked at that and decided DEC's business sense was so poor we weren't going to invest any more then we could in their systems, which of course turned out to be absolutely right).

hga 10y ago

(2) There are accidents of history. When DEC decided to discontinue the PDP-10, the days of the hacker community built around it were numbered. Those involved then went on to build Lisp machines... Nit on this bit of history: the PDP-6/10/Decsystem 20 architecture was a dead end due to its maximum address space of 1 MiB (of 9 bit bytes), but was still a very healthy line of computers when the Lisp Machine effort started circa 1974, about a decade before DEC dumped the whole line, then a 100 million a year business (a lot of us looked at that and decided DEC's business sense was so poor we weren't going to invest any more then we could in their systems, which of course turned out to be absolutely right).