5 ms·

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 v

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.
- lukego 10y ago
  Just a data point: I founded a Lisp startup together with a bunch of experienced Lisp hacker buddies from the SBCL community. Sadly and reluctantly, we found Lisp awkward and ended up rewriting everything in C, and then never looked back. These days I am developing such software with LuaJIT and that is working much better for me than either C or Lisp. One thing I learned along the way is that many tales of Lisp heroism are actually anti-paradigms. Once upon a time when I read about ITA Software rewriting CONS to better suit their application I thought it was impressive; now I see it as a farcical workaround for having chosen an ill-suited runtime system and sticking with it (and generally an indictment of Lisp not providing a practical performance model for the heap.) Lispers are too expert at spinning bugs as features. "It's insanely complex, every line could be an interaction with undefined behavior or a race condition or an unexpected heap allocation" becomes "suitable only in the hands of trained specialists, like a chef's knife or a surgeon's scalpel or a Jedi's light saber." I feel like we need to have a shared "our emperor didn't have any clothes" moment with regards to Paul Graham's essays. (I say this as somebody who does love Lisp and will probably do a lot more Lisp work in the future but only on a project that is a peculiarly good fit.)
  - lukego 10y ago
    (Funny feeling of being a Lisp hacker searching for catharsis in the Hacker News comments section... :-))
    - svetlyak40wt 10y ago
      Don't search, go do something cool,what all people will talk about!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

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.

lukego 10y ago
Just a data point: I founded a Lisp startup together with a bunch of experienced Lisp hacker buddies from the SBCL community. Sadly and reluctantly, we found Lisp awkward and ended up rewriting everything in C, and then never looked back. These days I am developing such software with LuaJIT and that is working much better for me than either C or Lisp. One thing I learned along the way is that many tales of Lisp heroism are actually anti-paradigms. Once upon a time when I read about ITA Software rewriting CONS to better suit their application I thought it was impressive; now I see it as a farcical workaround for having chosen an ill-suited runtime system and sticking with it (and generally an indictment of Lisp not providing a practical performance model for the heap.) Lispers are too expert at spinning bugs as features. "It's insanely complex, every line could be an interaction with undefined behavior or a race condition or an unexpected heap allocation" becomes "suitable only in the hands of trained specialists, like a chef's knife or a surgeon's scalpel or a Jedi's light saber." I feel like we need to have a shared "our emperor didn't have any clothes" moment with regards to Paul Graham's essays. (I say this as somebody who does love Lisp and will probably do a lot more Lisp work in the future but only on a project that is a peculiarly good fit.)
- lukego 10y ago
  (Funny feeling of being a Lisp hacker searching for catharsis in the Hacker News comments section... :-))
  - svetlyak40wt 10y ago
    Don't search, go do something cool,what all people will talk about!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]