3 ms·

The issue is that code is read more often than it is interpreted, written, or compiled. All the beautiful aspects of lisp make it decidedly unwieldy in product

The issue is that code is read more often than it is interpreted, written, or compiled. All the beautiful aspects of lisp make it decidedly unwieldy in production software. There’s a tendency of projects written in lisps to be unwritten in lisps as they mature.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
That has more to do with managerial ideas of programmer fungibility than Lisp's readability.
naniwaduni 7y ago
Frequently-used interpreted code is probably interpreted more than it is read. Most of the code in a large codebase is likely compiled more than it is read. One-off code is often written, compiled, and executed once, and read never. If a piece of code is read more often than it's interpreted, written, and compiled, it's probably example code.
lispm 7y ago
> The issue is that code is read more often than it is interpreted, written, or compiled. In a Lisp system, the code is always there and not just in textual forms. > All the beautiful aspects of lisp make it decidedly unwieldy in production software. There’s a tendency of projects written in lisps to be unwritten in lisps as they mature. There are two main factors which lead to Lisp software being rewritten: 1) deployment. In the early days it was the lack of resources (memory, speed, ...), but there are other factors like having a robust runtime or the ability to integrate in larger software around it. 2) familiarity. There are not many people available to maintain Lisp software. Not because the syntax is strange, but because the whole language is strange. There are no major other programming languages which work like Lisp, so few people can productively program in it. There are exceptions to it, like the simple Lisp used in AutoCAD and related software. These have millions of installations and the complexity on the Lisp side is not that huge - there it's mostly used as a simple interactive programming language. What makes Lisp actually difficult for programmers is not the syntax, but the pervasive use of code as data, code transformations, various ways of meta-programming, etc. It's the features it was developed for: computing with symbolic expressions - here even applied to itself. The language Lisp was built to compute with symbolic expressions, then the idea that a Lisp program is itself a symbolic expression is tempting... this then leads to center programming activities around this idea.
p_l 7y ago
The rewrites tend to involve managerial decisions and not technical (arguably Reddit was one of the few cases where I can point to clear cut technical reasons, the reason being "we wanted to run FreeBSD and threads sucked there"). Sometimes it's internal politics (like JPL's C++ developers giving Lisp as reason for their code segfaulting...). There's quite a lot of big systems written in Lisp. Unfortunately they rarely ever were opensourced, and we get to have blinders made out of our own limited experiences and common generational knowledge loss in IT.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

That has more to do with managerial ideas of programmer fungibility than Lisp's readability.

naniwaduni 7y ago

Frequently-used interpreted code is probably interpreted more than it is read. Most of the code in a large codebase is likely compiled more than it is read. One-off code is often written, compiled, and executed once, and read never. If a piece of code is read more often than it's interpreted, written, and compiled, it's probably example code.

lispm 7y ago

> The issue is that code is read more often than it is interpreted, written, or compiled. In a Lisp system, the code is always there and not just in textual forms. > All the beautiful aspects of lisp make it decidedly unwieldy in production software. There’s a tendency of projects written in lisps to be unwritten in lisps as they mature. There are two main factors which lead to Lisp software being rewritten: 1) deployment. In the early days it was the lack of resources (memory, speed, ...), but there are other factors like having a robust runtime or the ability to integrate in larger software around it. 2) familiarity. There are not many people available to maintain Lisp software. Not because the syntax is strange, but because the whole language is strange. There are no major other programming languages which work like Lisp, so few people can productively program in it. There are exceptions to it, like the simple Lisp used in AutoCAD and related software. These have millions of installations and the complexity on the Lisp side is not that huge - there it's mostly used as a simple interactive programming language. What makes Lisp actually difficult for programmers is not the syntax, but the pervasive use of code as data, code transformations, various ways of meta-programming, etc. It's the features it was developed for: computing with symbolic expressions - here even applied to itself. The language Lisp was built to compute with symbolic expressions, then the idea that a Lisp program is itself a symbolic expression is tempting... this then leads to center programming activities around this idea.

p_l 7y ago

The rewrites tend to involve managerial decisions and not technical (arguably Reddit was one of the few cases where I can point to clear cut technical reasons, the reason being "we wanted to run FreeBSD and threads sucked there"). Sometimes it's internal politics (like JPL's C++ developers giving Lisp as reason for their code segfaulting...). There's quite a lot of big systems written in Lisp. Unfortunately they rarely ever were opensourced, and we get to have blinders made out of our own limited experiences and common generational knowledge loss in IT.