8 ms·

My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erla

by lukego 10y ago

My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erlang, Haskell, assembler, C, etc. Confirmation bias makes it easy to bind those variables to values that make one's own favorite language obviously the best and everybody else's infuriatingly, irrationally terrible. If unchecked then this leads to wildly false conclusions, such as that languages fit into a hierarchy of powerfulness ("Blub Paradox.")

lukego 10y ago
Tangentially: I am working with LuaJIT these days and this feels really exciting to me. The compiler is a new kind of beast and possibly the beginning of a large Lisp-like family tree. Feels very "MACLISP" to me - exciting!
lisper 10y ago
What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.) This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.
- allenbrunson 10y ago
  that should be pretty obvious: lack of library support. there is the famous example of the reddit founders, who believed pg's lisp story, and built the first version of their site with it. it went so badly for them that they had to start over again in python. ... but i bet you are going to have a very plausible-sounding reason why it didn't work for them.
  - lisper 10y ago
    I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.
    - allenbrunson 10y ago
      okay, maybe i betrayed my biases there too much, but, i agree with everybody else: if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. plenty of other tech has come from up nothing in the last few decades, to wide adoption, and big successes. the fact that lisp hasn't is, in my mind, prima facie evidence that it is not nearly as great as its proponents claim.
      - lispm 10y ago
        > there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. There are, but you are ignoring them, you simply did not do any research or it is simply hidden. The success of Common Lisp today is relatively small, but a careful reader could find a few interesting applications of it like the scheduling system for the Hubble Space Telescope, the design software for the Boeing 747 (and other aircrafts), the software for the Roomba, the software for DWAVE's quantum computer, the crew scheduling software for the London subway, chip design verification software at Intel (and other chip companies), ... There are some old application platforms which survived. For example Cyc, an attempt to provide common sense AI to computers, is under continuous development since the mid 80s. The company Cycorp has 50+ employees, is very secretive and you need to guess who pays for it. Customers are among others the United States Department of Defense, DARPA, NSA, and CIA. They are using it for various applications. Note also that prototyping software was for a long time an application area for Lisp. Have relatively small teams develop a prototype and make it a product once the idea is validated. Example: Patrick Dussud wrote the core of the first Microsoft CLR (.Net Common Language Runtime) garbage collector in Lisp. The code was then automatically translated to C (IIRC) and enhanced from there after some time. Lisp now is no longer used and the GC has a lot of new features, but the first working versions came from that Lisp code.
      - lisper 10y ago
        > if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now Not necessarily. There are other possible explanations of Lisp's relative lack of commercial success, not least of which is the fact that a widespread belief that "there must be something wrong with it because no one uses it" can become (and I think has become) a self-fulfilling prophecy. But another important factor is that the Lisp community seems to attract people who are really good at tech but really bad at business. I think if someone (or, more likely, some pair of co-founders) could bridge that gap they could still kick some serious ass.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- lukego 10y ago
  I prefer not to. I think it would be more productive as a private thought experiment: what would you expect a Smalltalk hacker curse about if you forced them to use Common Lisp? a Haskell hacker? a Rust hacker? I think they would miss some really valuable things, and that you could easily miss the value of those things if you took them out of their original context (e.g. considering only whether Lisp would be improved by adopting those specific features.)

by lukego 10y ago

lukego 10y ago

Tangentially: I am working with LuaJIT these days and this feels really exciting to me. The compiler is a new kind of beast and possibly the beginning of a large Lisp-like family tree. Feels very "MACLISP" to me - exciting!

lisper 10y ago

What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.) This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.

allenbrunson 10y ago
that should be pretty obvious: lack of library support. there is the famous example of the reddit founders, who believed pg's lisp story, and built the first version of their site with it. it went so badly for them that they had to start over again in python. ... but i bet you are going to have a very plausible-sounding reason why it didn't work for them.
- lisper 10y ago
  I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.
  - allenbrunson 10y ago
    okay, maybe i betrayed my biases there too much, but, i agree with everybody else: if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. plenty of other tech has come from up nothing in the last few decades, to wide adoption, and big successes. the fact that lisp hasn't is, in my mind, prima facie evidence that it is not nearly as great as its proponents claim.
    - lispm 10y ago
      > there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. There are, but you are ignoring them, you simply did not do any research or it is simply hidden. The success of Common Lisp today is relatively small, but a careful reader could find a few interesting applications of it like the scheduling system for the Hubble Space Telescope, the design software for the Boeing 747 (and other aircrafts), the software for the Roomba, the software for DWAVE's quantum computer, the crew scheduling software for the London subway, chip design verification software at Intel (and other chip companies), ... There are some old application platforms which survived. For example Cyc, an attempt to provide common sense AI to computers, is under continuous development since the mid 80s. The company Cycorp has 50+ employees, is very secretive and you need to guess who pays for it. Customers are among others the United States Department of Defense, DARPA, NSA, and CIA. They are using it for various applications. Note also that prototyping software was for a long time an application area for Lisp. Have relatively small teams develop a prototype and make it a product once the idea is validated. Example: Patrick Dussud wrote the core of the first Microsoft CLR (.Net Common Language Runtime) garbage collector in Lisp. The code was then automatically translated to C (IIRC) and enhanced from there after some time. Lisp now is no longer used and the GC has a lot of new features, but the first working versions came from that Lisp code.
    - lisper 10y ago
      > if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now Not necessarily. There are other possible explanations of Lisp's relative lack of commercial success, not least of which is the fact that a widespread belief that "there must be something wrong with it because no one uses it" can become (and I think has become) a self-fulfilling prophecy. But another important factor is that the Lisp community seems to attract people who are really good at tech but really bad at business. I think if someone (or, more likely, some pair of co-founders) could bridge that gap they could still kick some serious ass.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lukego 10y ago
I prefer not to. I think it would be more productive as a private thought experiment: what would you expect a Smalltalk hacker curse about if you forced them to use Common Lisp? a Haskell hacker? a Rust hacker? I think they would miss some really valuable things, and that you could easily miss the value of those things if you took them out of their original context (e.g. considering only whether Lisp would be improved by adopting those specific features.)