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Why does nobody use it? I've never heard a satisfactory answer from LISPers. "People are dumb" is not a satisfactory answer.
by api 7y ago
Why does nobody use it? I've never heard a satisfactory answer from LISPers. "People are dumb" is not a satisfactory answer.
- jdmichal 7y agoThe best answer I've seen is the Lisp Curse. It's basically the idea that Lisp is so flexible that every project becomes its own DSL / idiomatic version of Lisp. Imagine what's being discussed here, except that every programmer actually has the power to just make the change rather than have to submit it to the central Rust team for consideration and eventual implementation. http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
- kazinator 7y agoI had the same thought. Lisp puts an end to the bikeshedding; everyone can build their own shed and paint it whatever they want, without having to break upstream. It also applies to the recent "Why I'm Leaving Elm" article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 Part of the struggle depicted in the article is between user defined language extensions "competing" with the upstream compiler. That's exactly a social problem that becomes a technical problem in Lisp.
- pcwalton 7y agoThere are a multitude of reasons, but I think the biggest ones are (1) the unfamiliar syntax; (2) the fact that Lisp runtimes tend to want all code that interacts with it to also be Lisp instead of focusing on FFI and interoperability; (3) Unix and C were free and so went viral.
- astrange 7y agoBecause of the rule of least power, it's actually bad for a language to be able to do anything.