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It's a bit trite to compare Lisp to the free market: it's not particularly difficult for me to concoct the same metaphor for Java. ("The wealth of libraries and

It's a bit trite to compare Lisp to the free market: it's not particularly difficult for me to concoct the same metaphor for Java. ("The wealth of libraries and frameworks, each vying for maximum use, exhibits emergent patterns of creative destruction, similar to those prevalent in the free market". See? Not that hard.) It may be well true that there are more competing implementations of Lisp. (Though that is also open to debate; after all, what is Android if not Java on a new VM? What of OpenJDK?) And in any case, the great majority of Lisp implementations are toy languages that lack the stability and features to be used in any serious environment. Your other points: * If armed bear isn't dead, it definitely smells funny -- at least the last time I checked (~1.5 years ago). * Clojure is cool in large part because it has access to the thousands of Java libraries written by those shamen-like programmers you get such a kick out of mocking. My point is that a programming language is just a tool to get something done. Those that mock supposedly inferior languages miss the point that there are aspects to those languages or environments that make them appealing for the job at hand. If I want to do a web site, I'd use PHP with WordPress, because I most likely won't have to write any code at all. If I want to write a web app, I might use Ruby or Python. If I'm a real-time market trading platform, I'll use Java because there's so much reliable, mature code out there and it's really fast. If I want to write a music application or plugin, then I'm going to need to use C++ to communicate with ASIO and VST. And, finally, if I want to write a Lisp interpreter, I'll use Lisp ;)

mahmud 16y ago
ABCL is far from dead. I hack on it and working on a Lisp SDK for Android. My opinions are backed by code. I implemented this new Java feature in ~30 lines of CL, there was no committee involved: http://mahmud.arablug.org/java-try-with-resource-in-lisp.html http://mahmud.arablug.org/java-try-with-resource-in-lisp.htm... Something has to be said for expressiveness when one guy with an spare hour can implement what might be considered a major language feature like this. Makes you wonder what else is being made difficult by the language; how much time and money, not to mention sanity, are being wasted trying to cut wood with a dull knife?

mahmud 16y ago

ABCL is far from dead. I hack on it and working on a Lisp SDK for Android. My opinions are backed by code. I implemented this new Java feature in ~30 lines of CL, there was no committee involved: http://mahmud.arablug.org/java-try-with-resource-in-lisp.html http://mahmud.arablug.org/java-try-with-resource-in-lisp.htm... Something has to be said for expressiveness when one guy with an spare hour can implement what might be considered a major language feature like this. Makes you wonder what else is being made difficult by the language; how much time and money, not to mention sanity, are being wasted trying to cut wood with a dull knife?