5 ms·

But in the last 60 years, simply grabbing these dissenters by the lapels and fumigating them with the stinky garlic breath of parenthesized S-expressions h

But in the last 60 years, simply grabbing these dissenters by the lapels and fumigating them with the stinky garlic breath of parenthesized S-expressions has not been a winning strategy.If Lisp partisans want different results in the next 60 years, we need to try something new. Given the rapid increase in programmers across the globe, I'd bet on there being more LISP programmers now than at any other time in human history. So why the obsession with popularity?

catach 7y ago
> So why the obsession with popularity? One reason could be altruism. If you believe your tool is superior to the tools that most others are using you may be highly motivated to convince those people to upgrade. Another reason could be that higher popularity leads to more jobs.
- neilv 7y ago
  Another is that practice relevance (adoption) is a factor in some research grants/funding. There's also adoption of their CS education programs, like HtDP, when clear industry relevance is one of the factors for some. I suppose that attracting students to the professors' own universities, at least undergrads, might also be a factor, though I haven't heard anything about that one.
JadeNB 7y ago
> Given the rapid increase in programmers across the globe, I'd bet on there being more LISP programmers now than at any other time in human history. So why the obsession with popularity? I think that there's a difference between a concern with popularity, which this article demonstrates, and an obsession with popularity, which may afflict parts of the Lisp community (not LISP any more, at least in most dialects) but isn't clearly demonstrated here. If quantitative popularity is important at all, then surely it is percentages and not absolute numbers that are most important (e.g., in 2016, Hillary Clinton got more votes in Texas than in Delaware—15 times more!—but that's not the relevant number). Even if quantitative popularity isn't important, surely some basic level of popularity is to be desired by fans of the language; and it must continually be renewed, not taken for granted. Note that more than the popularity of the language as a practical tool is at stake here; the article specifically talks about the declining popularity of Lisp as a teaching language, and, whatever language you use later in your hacking career, it's a shame to embark on that career not having been exposed to the ideas of Lisp (although, to be fair, those ideas have disseminated so much into the mainstream that many of them can be at least as easily found outside of Lisp as inside it).
jchw 7y ago
Because popularity is relative. Languages and frameworks benefit strongly from popularity because they are more likely to be well-supported and have thriving ecosystems the more popular they are. I'd say it is fairly healthy to be concerned about a language's popularity when talking about its future.
JasonFruit 7y ago
I don't know why this is such an unpopular comment. 5000 users today is the same number of people as 5000 users in 1970, even if there are way more potential users now. We can be pretty pleased that there are a bunch of people who are getting the productivity, fun, and education Lisp can provide, even if we might wish it had a higher percentage of users.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  I don't know why this is such an unpopular comment. HN can be a weird place. There's a lot of good discussion to be had. But the passive-aggressiveness and walking-on-eggshells behaviour required to not be greyed out into oblivion can be a bit much. It reminds me of visiting my childhood friends that had super strict parents - can't watch the simpsons, in bed at 7, etc etc. Always wondering what they might be upset by. I might go back to lurking. I'm a bad 'cultural fit'!
  - karmakaze 7y ago
    Making wholehearted, rational, unpopular comments is one of my fave HN things to do.
  - dTal 7y ago
    In my experience there is almost always an easily identifiable reason for a post being downvoted, and it's usually a good one. It's very avoidable if you engage your brain into "do not offend" mode before posting, which I find quite a positive habit to develop in other areas of life as well. In the case of your comment, the downvotes can be traced to your use of the unnecessarily negative word "obsession". You implied that people who want Lisp to be more popular are mentally unbalanced, even though this is a quite understandable thing to want. And you must admit that your reasoning is, at the very least, quite arguable, and warranted a greater tone of humility. Insults derived from dubious reasoning are a surefire recipe for downvotes. If you had concluded your post with "so it doesn't appear all that important to me for Lisp to be popular in an absolute sense" I think you would have been fine.
    - 7y ago
protomyth 7y ago
The sad truth from a corporate / enterprise perspective, popularity (or perceived popularity) means safety and checklist fulfillment. Management knows it can find people to plug into its empty slots, and HR has a easy thing to look for on the resume. People like comfort and safety. Now, you could say you are a startup and need the advantage. Good, you can do it, but you might have to supply more code to fill the gaps and deployment might require some extra knowledge (ecosystem problems). Its a value judgement as developer productivity isn't the only part of your development. Still, you can have a heck of an advantage. Look no further than the founder of this board, but remember the second part of the story. The Lisp got rewritten because it wasn't a comfortable choice for the new owners. Perceived popularity means comfort and ecosystem.
- neilv 7y ago
  Exactly. I've been arguing this for awhile. I'd go more specific than startups, to narrow in on those who are doing something unusual, such that they know they'll have to implement nontrivial stuff from scratch, no matter what language and off-the-shelf libraries/frameworks they use. That's one of the places that Racket can be a win. Related to that, I've also been trying to get people to stop saying "batteries included", because that's misleading, and sends the wrong message about what the actual relative strengths are. In practice, I suspect the initial startup adoption will largely be chance/serendipity, until there's at least one great startup success story, to interest and inspire confidence in other startup efforts. (I have one great success story, which was due to such serendipity, but it's a non-public system, and I've been milking that one way too long already in promoting Racket.)

catach 7y ago

> So why the obsession with popularity? One reason could be altruism. If you believe your tool is superior to the tools that most others are using you may be highly motivated to convince those people to upgrade. Another reason could be that higher popularity leads to more jobs.

neilv 7y ago
Another is that practice relevance (adoption) is a factor in some research grants/funding. There's also adoption of their CS education programs, like HtDP, when clear industry relevance is one of the factors for some. I suppose that attracting students to the professors' own universities, at least undergrads, might also be a factor, though I haven't heard anything about that one.

JadeNB 7y ago

> Given the rapid increase in programmers across the globe, I'd bet on there being more LISP programmers now than at any other time in human history. So why the obsession with popularity? I think that there's a difference between a concern with popularity, which this article demonstrates, and an obsession with popularity, which may afflict parts of the Lisp community (not LISP any more, at least in most dialects) but isn't clearly demonstrated here. If quantitative popularity is important at all, then surely it is percentages and not absolute numbers that are most important (e.g., in 2016, Hillary Clinton got more votes in Texas than in Delaware—15 times more!—but that's not the relevant number). Even if quantitative popularity isn't important, surely some basic level of popularity is to be desired by fans of the language; and it must continually be renewed, not taken for granted. Note that more than the popularity of the language as a practical tool is at stake here; the article specifically talks about the declining popularity of Lisp as a teaching language, and, whatever language you use later in your hacking career, it's a shame to embark on that career not having been exposed to the ideas of Lisp (although, to be fair, those ideas have disseminated so much into the mainstream that many of them can be at least as easily found outside of Lisp as inside it).

jchw 7y ago

Because popularity is relative. Languages and frameworks benefit strongly from popularity because they are more likely to be well-supported and have thriving ecosystems the more popular they are. I'd say it is fairly healthy to be concerned about a language's popularity when talking about its future.

JasonFruit 7y ago

I don't know why this is such an unpopular comment. 5000 users today is the same number of people as 5000 users in 1970, even if there are way more potential users now. We can be pretty pleased that there are a bunch of people who are getting the productivity, fun, and education Lisp can provide, even if we might wish it had a higher percentage of users.

lacampbell 7y ago
I don't know why this is such an unpopular comment. HN can be a weird place. There's a lot of good discussion to be had. But the passive-aggressiveness and walking-on-eggshells behaviour required to not be greyed out into oblivion can be a bit much. It reminds me of visiting my childhood friends that had super strict parents - can't watch the simpsons, in bed at 7, etc etc. Always wondering what they might be upset by. I might go back to lurking. I'm a bad 'cultural fit'!
- karmakaze 7y ago
  Making wholehearted, rational, unpopular comments is one of my fave HN things to do.
- dTal 7y ago
  In my experience there is almost always an easily identifiable reason for a post being downvoted, and it's usually a good one. It's very avoidable if you engage your brain into "do not offend" mode before posting, which I find quite a positive habit to develop in other areas of life as well. In the case of your comment, the downvotes can be traced to your use of the unnecessarily negative word "obsession". You implied that people who want Lisp to be more popular are mentally unbalanced, even though this is a quite understandable thing to want. And you must admit that your reasoning is, at the very least, quite arguable, and warranted a greater tone of humility. Insults derived from dubious reasoning are a surefire recipe for downvotes. If you had concluded your post with "so it doesn't appear all that important to me for Lisp to be popular in an absolute sense" I think you would have been fine.
  - 7y ago

protomyth 7y ago

The sad truth from a corporate / enterprise perspective, popularity (or perceived popularity) means safety and checklist fulfillment. Management knows it can find people to plug into its empty slots, and HR has a easy thing to look for on the resume. People like comfort and safety. Now, you could say you are a startup and need the advantage. Good, you can do it, but you might have to supply more code to fill the gaps and deployment might require some extra knowledge (ecosystem problems). Its a value judgement as developer productivity isn't the only part of your development. Still, you can have a heck of an advantage. Look no further than the founder of this board, but remember the second part of the story. The Lisp got rewritten because it wasn't a comfortable choice for the new owners. Perceived popularity means comfort and ecosystem.

neilv 7y ago
Exactly. I've been arguing this for awhile. I'd go more specific than startups, to narrow in on those who are doing something unusual, such that they know they'll have to implement nontrivial stuff from scratch, no matter what language and off-the-shelf libraries/frameworks they use. That's one of the places that Racket can be a win. Related to that, I've also been trying to get people to stop saying "batteries included", because that's misleading, and sends the wrong message about what the actual relative strengths are. In practice, I suspect the initial startup adoption will largely be chance/serendipity, until there's at least one great startup success story, to interest and inspire confidence in other startup efforts. (I have one great success story, which was due to such serendipity, but it's a non-public system, and I've been milking that one way too long already in promoting Racket.)

But in the last 60 years, simply grab­bing these dissenters by the lapels and fumi­gating them with the stinky garlic breath of paren­the­sized S-expres­sions h

But in the last 60 years, simply grab­bing these dissenters by the lapels and fumi­gating them with the stinky garlic breath of paren­the­sized S-expres­sions h

But in the last 60 years, simply grabbing these dissenters by the lapels and fumigating them with the stinky garlic breath of parenthesized S-expressions h

But in the last 60 years, simply grabbing these dissenters by the lapels and fumigating them with the stinky garlic breath of parenthesized S-expressions h