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Here's an anecdote from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 On another note, why do you thi

by lwat 16y ago

Here's an anecdote from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 On another note, why do you think lisp isn't more widely used?

pavelludiq 16y ago
Others already pointed out the AI winter. Reading about the history of lisp is very interesting, it almost feels like you are reading about a lost civilization, so ahead of its time. On the other hand, the AI winter is in the past, why isn't lisp used NOW? I think its getting better, the scheme people are working on sorting out their issues, and of course theres Racket, which is awesome. You have the clojure people attracting a lot of java and ruby developers(among others) to at least give lisp a chance. And even the Common Lisp world is on the rise. The biggest problem IMHO is that there are too many non lisp programmers with strong opinions on lisp that spread FUD, even though all their lisp experience can be summarized as "read a scheme tutorial, and wrote a recursive factorial function".
euccastro 16y ago
Well, that anecdote talks about some people _fearing_ powerful, expressive languages. In a previous job I had workmates arguing for banning "nested" Python list comprehensions. And as an example of such horrible nesting he proposed something like: some_list = [some_function(blah) for blah in some_other_function() if some_condition(blah)] What this says to me is that this guy didn't get list comprehensions at all and didn't want to. Sure enough, there's no nesting whatsoever going on here. He was just scared by non-C++-like syntax. My point is: popularity, though desirable in itself, is a poor measure of anything else. Most people run away from good things for no valid reason. (Not saying there are no valid reasons why Lisp is not more popular, only that none would really be needed. Obscurity is quite a stable default.)
rayiner 16y ago
Why isn't Smalltalk, Prolog, Modula, ML, Eifel, FORTRAN, Ada, APL, etc, more widely used? Because there can only be a couple of "mainstream" languages, and C/C++ took up all the mindshare in that period. In fact, a more useful question is: "why is Lisp even used as much as it is?" The current Common Lisp standard is 20 years old, and yet it supports a pretty active if small user community, which is more than can be said of most of its contemporaries.
cesarm 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

by lwat 16y ago

Here's an anecdote from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240461 On another note, why do you think lisp isn't more widely used?

pavelludiq 16y ago

Others already pointed out the AI winter. Reading about the history of lisp is very interesting, it almost feels like you are reading about a lost civilization, so ahead of its time. On the other hand, the AI winter is in the past, why isn't lisp used NOW? I think its getting better, the scheme people are working on sorting out their issues, and of course theres Racket, which is awesome. You have the clojure people attracting a lot of java and ruby developers(among others) to at least give lisp a chance. And even the Common Lisp world is on the rise. The biggest problem IMHO is that there are too many non lisp programmers with strong opinions on lisp that spread FUD, even though all their lisp experience can be summarized as "read a scheme tutorial, and wrote a recursive factorial function".

euccastro 16y ago

Well, that anecdote talks about some people _fearing_ powerful, expressive languages. In a previous job I had workmates arguing for banning "nested" Python list comprehensions. And as an example of such horrible nesting he proposed something like: some_list = [some_function(blah) for blah in some_other_function() if some_condition(blah)] What this says to me is that this guy didn't get list comprehensions at all and didn't want to. Sure enough, there's no nesting whatsoever going on here. He was just scared by non-C++-like syntax. My point is: popularity, though desirable in itself, is a poor measure of anything else. Most people run away from good things for no valid reason. (Not saying there are no valid reasons why Lisp is not more popular, only that none would really be needed. Obscurity is quite a stable default.)

rayiner 16y ago

Why isn't Smalltalk, Prolog, Modula, ML, Eifel, FORTRAN, Ada, APL, etc, more widely used? Because there can only be a couple of "mainstream" languages, and C/C++ took up all the mindshare in that period. In fact, a more useful question is: "why is Lisp even used as much as it is?" The current Common Lisp standard is 20 years old, and yet it supports a pretty active if small user community, which is more than can be said of most of its contemporaries.

cesarm 16y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better