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I think Clojure addresses much of the author's points. I have greatly enjoyed learning the "Lisp" way to solve problems, while still having the option to use Ja

I think Clojure addresses much of the author's points. I have greatly enjoyed learning the "Lisp" way to solve problems, while still having the option to use Java's massive ecosystem. It cannot, however, deal with the biggest (IMO) problem with Lisp: the fact that his list includes "Too Good" and "Too Smart" (and the elitist tone that accompanies them). It is off-putting to try and read about this apparently amazing language, and have large portions of every (hyperbole) article saying effectively that if people were just { smarter || better || less sheep like } they would use Lisp. Luckily, the Clojure community appears to have avoided this attitude so far. P.S. I mean no disrespect to the author, and I fully understand that language advocacy often takes a confrontational approach.

deleted 16y ago
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mtviewdave 16y ago
IMHO, the biggest reason why Lisp never won out over imperative programming languages is exactly this attitude. Advocates of imperative programming languages took critiques of those languages seriously, while Lisp advocates wouldn't. Take the evolution of C, for example. First, you had ALGOL, but it had problems. So someone created CPL. But that had problems, so then we had BCPL. Then B. Then C. That’s five separate languages! People on the imperative side of the language divide were willing to throw stuff out and start from scratch, over and over, until they got it right. Lisp advocates were not. Fortunately, the creation of Clojure suggests that a willingness to change is finally making its way into some areas of the greater Lisp community.
- deleted 16y ago
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- nickik 16y ago
  you didn't really follow the history of lisp did you? Plz at least go to wikipedia befor you write something.
- sedachv 16y ago
  You seriously think that C is an improvement over Algol?
- chc 16y ago
  Are you really saying that Common Lisp and Scheme are that much more similar to primitive Lisps than C is to Algol-68? That isn't my impression at all. I'd say Clojure is to Scheme as C# is to C, roughly speaking.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Since Lisp actually has changed a lot over the years, I guess what you're saying is that they should have changed the name every so often?
gnosis 16y ago
"the biggest (IMO) problem with Lisp: the fact that his list includes "Too Good" and "Too Smart" (and the elitist tone that accompanies them). "It is off-putting to try and read about this apparently amazing language, and have large portions of every (hyperbole) article saying effectively that if people were just { smarter || better || less sheep like } they would use Lisp." Perhaps you missed the wave of Perl hate that Python and Ruby rode to popularity on. This anti-Perl snobbery hasn't seemed to have hurt them any. Or how about the snobbery of C users against COBOL and FORTRAN? Once again, C got adopted despite (or perhaps even because) of it. Or the religious wars over static vs dynamic typing, functional vs imperative, OO vs procedural, and which editor or OS is superior. This kind of elitism is really endemic in the programming field, is by no means restricted to Lisp, and is probably not very relevant to the lack of adoption of Lisp in the general programming community. Rather, I'd chalk it up to more of a matter of marketing. Lisp is still viewed as more of a (difficult) academic language, rather than a practical one. It's also rather old by now, and doesn't have the shiny/new sparkle that helped Java and Perl (in their day), and Ruby and Python (more recently). Also, how many killer apps (that a typical programmer cares about) have been written in Lisp? Where is Lisp's Ruby on Rails?
- deleted 16y ago
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- chc 16y ago
  There is a large distinction between hating on the language and hating on the users. Ruby and Python were both sort of anti-Perl, but it was not usually expressed along the lines of "Perl users are too stupid to write Hello World in our language." It was more like, "Dang, Perl users. How do you manage to get anything done with that rotting fish-head of a language? Check out what we have over here in civilization!"
  - chromatic 16y ago
    It was more like, "Dang, Perl users. How do you manage to get anything done with that rotting fish-head of a language? Check out what we have over here in civilization!" ... which is ironic for students of language design who realize that none of (for example) Ruby, Python, and PHP get lexical scoping anything close to correct, that none of them do object systems particularly well, none of them do an extension system particularly well, and only Python comes close to the amount of available and accurate documentation or the robust test coverage of the language and its features. You can discount a lot of the rest of the criticism as "I didn't bother to learn what makes the language unique before writing a bunch of awful code" and "I don't like sigils but am embarrassed to sound that much a snob."

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mtviewdave 16y ago

IMHO, the biggest reason why Lisp never won out over imperative programming languages is exactly this attitude. Advocates of imperative programming languages took critiques of those languages seriously, while Lisp advocates wouldn't. Take the evolution of C, for example. First, you had ALGOL, but it had problems. So someone created CPL. But that had problems, so then we had BCPL. Then B. Then C. That’s five separate languages! People on the imperative side of the language divide were willing to throw stuff out and start from scratch, over and over, until they got it right. Lisp advocates were not. Fortunately, the creation of Clojure suggests that a willingness to change is finally making its way into some areas of the greater Lisp community.

deleted 16y ago
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nickik 16y ago
you didn't really follow the history of lisp did you? Plz at least go to wikipedia befor you write something.
sedachv 16y ago
You seriously think that C is an improvement over Algol?
chc 16y ago
Are you really saying that Common Lisp and Scheme are that much more similar to primitive Lisps than C is to Algol-68? That isn't my impression at all. I'd say Clojure is to Scheme as C# is to C, roughly speaking.
loewenskind 16y ago
Since Lisp actually has changed a lot over the years, I guess what you're saying is that they should have changed the name every so often?

gnosis 16y ago

"the biggest (IMO) problem with Lisp: the fact that his list includes "Too Good" and "Too Smart" (and the elitist tone that accompanies them). "It is off-putting to try and read about this apparently amazing language, and have large portions of every (hyperbole) article saying effectively that if people were just { smarter || better || less sheep like } they would use Lisp." Perhaps you missed the wave of Perl hate that Python and Ruby rode to popularity on. This anti-Perl snobbery hasn't seemed to have hurt them any. Or how about the snobbery of C users against COBOL and FORTRAN? Once again, C got adopted despite (or perhaps even because) of it. Or the religious wars over static vs dynamic typing, functional vs imperative, OO vs procedural, and which editor or OS is superior. This kind of elitism is really endemic in the programming field, is by no means restricted to Lisp, and is probably not very relevant to the lack of adoption of Lisp in the general programming community. Rather, I'd chalk it up to more of a matter of marketing. Lisp is still viewed as more of a (difficult) academic language, rather than a practical one. It's also rather old by now, and doesn't have the shiny/new sparkle that helped Java and Perl (in their day), and Ruby and Python (more recently). Also, how many killer apps (that a typical programmer cares about) have been written in Lisp? Where is Lisp's Ruby on Rails?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
chc 16y ago
There is a large distinction between hating on the language and hating on the users. Ruby and Python were both sort of anti-Perl, but it was not usually expressed along the lines of "Perl users are too stupid to write Hello World in our language." It was more like, "Dang, Perl users. How do you manage to get anything done with that rotting fish-head of a language? Check out what we have over here in civilization!"
- chromatic 16y ago
  It was more like, "Dang, Perl users. How do you manage to get anything done with that rotting fish-head of a language? Check out what we have over here in civilization!" ... which is ironic for students of language design who realize that none of (for example) Ruby, Python, and PHP get lexical scoping anything close to correct, that none of them do object systems particularly well, none of them do an extension system particularly well, and only Python comes close to the amount of available and accurate documentation or the robust test coverage of the language and its features. You can discount a lot of the rest of the criticism as "I didn't bother to learn what makes the language unique before writing a bunch of awful code" and "I don't like sigils but am embarrassed to sound that much a snob."