5 ms·

Let me tell you my perspective as a Lisp enthusiast and ex-software engineer who now works in academia. I think the problem is that most people who write softwa

Let me tell you my perspective as a Lisp enthusiast and ex-software engineer who now works in academia. I think the problem is that most people who write software in the world (even many professional software engineers) just want to solve their problem and will resist if at all possible having to learn anything difficult (such as S-expression syntax), even if it is promised that their hard work will pay off. The academics I work with, for instance, prefer Python, tolerate Java, do OK with JavaScript, but run for the hills when they see Lisp. When I tell them that ClojureScript not only has semantics with consistency that will elicit sobs of joy, but is also historically the most stable and concise way of targeting JS in the browser, maybe a few of them will be interested, but as soon as I show them a code snippet it's all over. They turn their heads sideways, they frown so that their lips are like the parentheses that splay before them, they mutter something about parentheses, and they go back to tripping over themselves in JavaScript trying to remember which Array functions are mutating or pure. Learning a new syntax makes you feel dumb, even if you know how to program. And if you're feeling dumb while you're working on something that isn't even strictly related to the problem you're supposed to be solving before your deadline, it starts to get really hard to justify it. Most people only know something with a Python-like syntax, so most people will only ever work with languages which look like Python or Java since it's what they learned in their programming curriculum. It's ALGOL's world, and Lisp's just living in it. Who does learn Lisp, then? I'd say, from what I've learned about the people in the Lisp world: mathematicians and computer scientists with intrinsic interest in PL's or the mathematical underpinnings of Lisp, old school symbolic AI researchers, and grizzled software engineering veterans who believe Lisp-family languages are engineering weapons of choice. All of these people have motivations (interest in mathematics and PL's per se, an academic interest with an historical connection to Lisp, and an insatiable itch for an ever more comfortable hammock even if it means getting out of the one you're in right now) that do not apply to the larger class of programmers that I just described. I wish it weren't so. I wish more people would take the time to learn Lisp or an editor like Vim or EMACS: we, ahem, enlightened ones, know what a pittance the upfront investment will come to seem when the benefits of a superior tool are reaped over a lifetime, but people do not listen or do not believe when we tell them so. (Maybe they're right.) Perhaps we should ask ourselves what could make the promise of our salvation more credible.

dtornabene 7y ago
I ..just... learning s-expressions isn't hard. At all. Its a made up thing and I think people cling to it because it gives them an out, they don't want to feel dumb or uninteresting in their work (understandable). As far as who learns lisp these days, while Clojure may not be doing Python numbers in terms of adherents, it is absolutely used in increasing numbers in business software, has multiple decent sized conferences and forms the back bone for a number of large open source projects. Its also used as a foundation for a lot of devops and build-tools type work. Racket scheme is used by at least a dozen universities for everything from intro to programming classes, to advanced semantics and compilers classes. On top of that there are a suite of new tools written recently (last few years) in Guile which are slowly gaining ground (Guix being the main one), Chez was recently opensourced (and is being integrated into Racket), Common lisp is still used all over and, wait for it, emacs isn't going anywhere. Lisp isn't the specialist tool or old ("grizzled") standby its purported to be. I think this is some message board logic, honestly. Not trying to be overly hostile or antagonistic, I just don't see the scene/market/environment in those terms. For example, I just discovered an extremely interesting but kind of weird embedded lisp in the wild several months ago! Its a scripting extension to a binary analysis framework that doesn't have first class functions, but does utilize meta-programming to drive a term-rewriting engine that executes single instructions on an emulator. Awesome, and strange, and, as far as I've been able to tell, not noted anywhere people draw up lists of lisp implementations (its been out, open sourced for almost 7 years that I know of). Lisp is kind of everywhere, it just doesn't have an organized messaging clique pushing awareness constantly everywhere (thankfully).
- vnorilo 7y ago
  Right. Who are these people who do (numpy stuff) linear algebra, svd decomposition, pseudoinverses, linear regression, machine learning, but see a S-expression and immediately give up?
  - smallnamespace 7y ago
    Mathematicians aren't averse to learning syntax, but they're lazy. They learned that stuff because they are either basic methods in the field that have demonstrated value, or what they're actually doing research on. The syntax buys them power that they wouldn't otherwise have, and they can smell it. S-expressions? Not so much - the notation is more or less and arbitrary choice unless you're going to leverage the metalanguage capabilities to the hilt, and there are many other programming approaches available. A mathematician who really wanted to jump into the deep end with programming syntax/structure would much more likely pick up Haskell (categories, yay!) or AVL rather than Lisp.

dtornabene 7y ago

I ..just... learning s-expressions isn't hard. At all. Its a made up thing and I think people cling to it because it gives them an out, they don't want to feel dumb or uninteresting in their work (understandable). As far as who learns lisp these days, while Clojure may not be doing Python numbers in terms of adherents, it is absolutely used in increasing numbers in business software, has multiple decent sized conferences and forms the back bone for a number of large open source projects. Its also used as a foundation for a lot of devops and build-tools type work. Racket scheme is used by at least a dozen universities for everything from intro to programming classes, to advanced semantics and compilers classes. On top of that there are a suite of new tools written recently (last few years) in Guile which are slowly gaining ground (Guix being the main one), Chez was recently opensourced (and is being integrated into Racket), Common lisp is still used all over and, wait for it, emacs isn't going anywhere. Lisp isn't the specialist tool or old ("grizzled") standby its purported to be. I think this is some message board logic, honestly. Not trying to be overly hostile or antagonistic, I just don't see the scene/market/environment in those terms. For example, I just discovered an extremely interesting but kind of weird embedded lisp in the wild several months ago! Its a scripting extension to a binary analysis framework that doesn't have first class functions, but does utilize meta-programming to drive a term-rewriting engine that executes single instructions on an emulator. Awesome, and strange, and, as far as I've been able to tell, not noted anywhere people draw up lists of lisp implementations (its been out, open sourced for almost 7 years that I know of). Lisp is kind of everywhere, it just doesn't have an organized messaging clique pushing awareness constantly everywhere (thankfully).

vnorilo 7y ago
Right. Who are these people who do (numpy stuff) linear algebra, svd decomposition, pseudoinverses, linear regression, machine learning, but see a S-expression and immediately give up?
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  Mathematicians aren't averse to learning syntax, but they're lazy. They learned that stuff because they are either basic methods in the field that have demonstrated value, or what they're actually doing research on. The syntax buys them power that they wouldn't otherwise have, and they can smell it. S-expressions? Not so much - the notation is more or less and arbitrary choice unless you're going to leverage the metalanguage capabilities to the hilt, and there are many other programming approaches available. A mathematician who really wanted to jump into the deep end with programming syntax/structure would much more likely pick up Haskell (categories, yay!) or AVL rather than Lisp.