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Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.
by s_Hogg 7y ago
Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.
- mtreis86 7y agoLisps are hackers' languages - programming languages made for writing programming languages. The following applies to Common Lisp at least, if not others. It is homoiconic and most implementations are written in Lisp. It is very open, in that you can inspect existing structures from the REPL. It has a long history and was the language where many common software paradigms were developed. It comes with powerful builtin tools like a debugger with restarts where you can make changes to the system live. The core language is very small but doesn't constrain what can be done with it.
- jplayer01 7y agoI don't feel it gets any more attention than Python, C, C++ or any of the functional languages. What do you have against Lisp?
- s_Hogg 7y agoAs I state in the post containing my question - nothing :) just wondering is all
- Boulth 7y agoMaybe it's because HN itself is written in a dialect of Lisp.
- s_Hogg 7y agoDo you reckon that's all there is to it?
- dreamcompiler 7y agoWhat organization hosts HN? From what computer science construct does that organization's name come from? Who founded that organization? How did that person get wealthy enough to start seed funding other companies? Did that person write not one, but two books on Common Lisp? Just some points to ponder.
- s_Hogg 7y agoOh really, that's interesting. Is that sort of info widely known among the HN user base and I'm an ignoramus or is it a case of some of the users of longer standing being vocal about Lisp?
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoI would guess that the majority of HN users never even think about the fact that the site is affiliated with Y Combinator and its associated personalities.
- s_Hogg 7y agoI'm well aware of the start up incubator link, but you're definitely right otherwise in my case. When you get here it just looks like a nice lil' news site!
- detaro 7y agoQuite likely, but also something users that have been around a long time might not think about. From my understanding, in the early days of HN the link was a lot closer (content-wise, pg participating on the site, ...)
- lispm 7y agoAmong Lisp users this is known... Also if one knows a bit about Lisp history, the headline "O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp" triggers some memories, since for a long time O'Reilly actively discouraged people from trying to contact them about publishing Lisp books. ;-)
- sireat 7y agoHN exists because of LISP. More precisely PG attributed success of Viaweb to LISP (speed of iteration etc) http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I am pretty sure the key factor was having a small and talented team. It didn't have to be LISP. They could have used another language they were familiar with.
- toyg 7y agoEven if you give LISP a role, one also has to consider that it was a time when the most popular languages (C++, early Java, Perl) were pretty low-level and not at all web-friendly or async-friendly. LISP could bridge that gap because it makes it very easy to build DSLs and "go up" in abstraction with minimal fuss. If you start with Python or Ruby and their popular frameworks, these days, most of that work is already done for you.
- mepian 7y agoPython already existed at that time for 4 years, at least.
- CydeWeys 7y agoNew languages are coming out all the time. For every one like Python that proves to have serious staying power, there are dozens of others that slowly stagnate. It doesn't typically make sense to bet your business on a new unproven language; you want to use something that's already been around for awhile, clearly has staying power, and has a decent community built up around it. Lisp has fit that bill for decades now. At the time of Viaweb's founding, Python was not there yet. The closest thing that was would've been Perl.
- toyg 7y agoPython didn't even have lambda/map/filter/reduce until '94. Lisp was already Lisp.
- 7y ago
- sp332 7y agoPaul Graham was on the team that wrote Viaweb in Lisp. He wrote very highly of it, so HN attracted a lot of Lisp supporters early on.
- tosh 7y agoI was wondering the same thing. IIRC I found hn without having a clue about either Lisp nor about Startups or YCombinator. Over time I noticed that posts about Lisp were quite common and decided to read up on it thinking there must be something to it if people bring it up again and again. Has been a gratifying journey so far.
- s_Hogg 7y agoYeah I got here without having anything to do with Lisp at all either.
- Annatar 7y agoBecause it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.
- mepian 7y agoSBCL is open source, so you are free to improve the support for Solaris.
- mark_l_watson 7y agoAlso, the SBCL maintainers can be hired for custom help or support - one of my customers did this, with good results.
- Annatar 7y agoI'm a private person in this capacity, so paying someone to reverse the breakage is out of the question. It's an outrage that something like that was allowed to happen in the first place. If this were my software, not only would I fix it immediately, but I would be deeply ashamed of myself for allowing it to happen. We as programmers should start taking responsibility for our actions.
- Annatar 7y agoI would if I knew how; it sure wasn't for lack of my trying to do so, but I don't know enough to pull it off. By the way expecting that something be fixed by a non-specialist just because something is open source and expecting someone to sink their extremely valuable free time so someone could break and destroy that work again, well, that's not only despicable, it's extremely infuriating. All the more infuriating as SBCL wouldn't exist without Solaris, which means someone already broke it at least once and here you come expecting me to not only know what to fix, but invest my life into something where my effort would likely be broken upstream again. This needs to be taken up by the core SBCL team. Meanwhile, pity the time I used to report bugs which just sit there unhandled.
- breck 7y agoA lot of people (notably the creator of YCombinator and HackerNews) are arguably "in love with" Lisp. I bet circa 1940's you would say the same thing about binary, and your question might be "why is X this interested in binary?" Just as binary notation is a very simple notation that underlies all of computing, and has completely changed the world once an enthusiastic group of early adopters figured out how to leverage it, so goes Lisp. The details people haven't gotten quite right yet with Lisp, but once those are straightened out, imo, it will finally go mainstream like binary has.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Der_Einzige 7y agoLain from the hit anime, "Serial experiments lain" used lisp when she coded
- klez 7y agoYeah, except this isn't Lainchan, it's HN.
- edraferi 7y agoBecause Paul Graham, who founded Y Combinator and by extension Hacker News, loves Lisp. He used it as the primary language at Viaweb (basically late 90s Shopify) and viewed the language as a key enabled of their success. Paul’s blog posts on the subject are useful background: http://paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://paulgraham.com/lisp.html You should probably start with this one: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
- cheez 7y agoLisp the language has "code as data" which other languages are just catching up on. Basically, you can generate code using formal code, not a pre-processor
- SquishyPanda23 7y agoIndependently of the connection between PG and Lisp, many engineers are interested in Lisp because it's one of the simplest programming languages that is closely connected to the Lambda calculus. E.g. https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/lambda/lisp.html https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/lambda/lisp.html
- emit_time 7y agoIs the second programming language to have existed, and it is still used for some applications. It has some unique properties, including _code is data_. It is a functional language, and functional programming is making a comeback as well. There's a lot to it. I work at a company that used common lisp all the way down.
- ken 7y agoi. From the Jargon File: "The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP has since shared the throne with C." Even though it's not the dominant HLL today, it's been around for 50 years. There's a lot of area under that curve. ii. It's properly a family of languages, and they usually have "Lisp" in the name (plus Scheme, and now Clojure -- still a small enough set you can remember them all). The Algol family of languages don't all have "Algol" in the name, and the Simula-style object systems don't all have "Simula" in the name, even though both of those are extremely popular today.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoPaul Graham the founder of Ycombinator was a Lisper.
- lawn 7y agoLisp is an interesting programming language. Some have strong opinions that it's a good one as well. I personally think it deserves more attention than it gets and the more mainstream languages usually get more attention than they deserve (like Go for example).