4 ms·

I find it interesting that Clojure (and LISPs in general) have enjoyed an upsurge of attention since this 20th anniversary post. Maybe we're in the mania phase?

I find it interesting that Clojure (and LISPs in general) have enjoyed an upsurge of attention since this 20th anniversary post. Maybe we're in the mania phase? As an anecdote, I've now been on both language spectrums. In large C++ projects I can absolutely attest to the "Needs many people" claim. Now that I've worked in Clojure on projects of equal importance, it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone.

pjmlp 10y ago
Many of modern IDE features go back to Lisp and Smalltalk workstations. Yet they still don't offer all their capabilities. Had those environments succeed in the market, the whole development experience workflow would be much better. Think of Bret Viktor style presentations. Sadly due to their prices, many know Common Lisp via the open source command line compilers, instead of environments that trace back to those workstations like Franz Common Lisp.
progman 10y ago
> it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone which proves that Lisp and the "bipolar Lisp programmer" are not necessarily related together. I think BBM's prefer Lisp because it is really convenient to develop without having to be dependent on others. C++ may be considered a "social" language, however I discovered that it is not the language itself which encourages social development but some coders make so silly mistakes that they actually need the help of others to fix them. For instance, some devs open files without closing them, etc. I wonder if those people would actually write cleaner code with Lisp because such silly mistakes are not so easy in Lisp due to is structured programming (with-open-file ...). Also buffer overflows and the like are much harder to accomplish in Lisp than in C++. Some devs, in particular Edi Weitz and the quicklisp authors are evidence that Lisp preference and social interest are not mutually exclusive. http://weitz.de/lisp.html http://weitz.de/lisp.html

pjmlp 10y ago

Many of modern IDE features go back to Lisp and Smalltalk workstations. Yet they still don't offer all their capabilities. Had those environments succeed in the market, the whole development experience workflow would be much better. Think of Bret Viktor style presentations. Sadly due to their prices, many know Common Lisp via the open source command line compilers, instead of environments that trace back to those workstations like Franz Common Lisp.

progman 10y ago

> it's mind-bending how much I can accomplish alone which proves that Lisp and the "bipolar Lisp programmer" are not necessarily related together. I think BBM's prefer Lisp because it is really convenient to develop without having to be dependent on others. C++ may be considered a "social" language, however I discovered that it is not the language itself which encourages social development but some coders make so silly mistakes that they actually need the help of others to fix them. For instance, some devs open files without closing them, etc. I wonder if those people would actually write cleaner code with Lisp because such silly mistakes are not so easy in Lisp due to is structured programming (with-open-file ...). Also buffer overflows and the like are much harder to accomplish in Lisp than in C++. Some devs, in particular Edi Weitz and the quicklisp authors are evidence that Lisp preference and social interest are not mutually exclusive. http://weitz.de/lisp.html http://weitz.de/lisp.html