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This might sound harsh, but Common Lisp fans should stop whining about what everybody else is doing and start making some killer apps to bring back some life in

This might sound harsh, but Common Lisp fans should stop whining about what everybody else is doing and start making some killer apps to bring back some life into their language. Hearing all about Lisp's past glories is far less convincing than working code. It's just off-putting to hear complaints about what someone else did. As always in free software, the one who puts in the hours gets to call the shots.

dpc_pw 6y ago
> This might sound harsh, but Common Lisp fans should stop whining about what everybody else is doing and start making some killer apps to bring back some life into their language. They can't. They are all busy implementing another Lisp in Lisp.
agumonkey 6y ago
There's a psychological paradox at play. Many idealistic lispers want a lot of things but they don't play the current game, they (I can include myself partially) care more about the tool than the product and it just dies a quick death. For this to happen they have to turn their view of lisp from beauty to an effective tool to win on pragmatic points: time to develop, number of bugs, ease of adaptability. CL has a hammer for all this points but you have to see the field that way and produce things.. well basically 'less is more' vs 'perfectionism'
pmoriarty 6y ago
As a huge Lisp fan (though more of Scheme than Common Lisp), I kind of agree. If a Lisper had come up with Jupyter notebooks before Python did, they could have captured the interest of academia. If they'd come out with a Ruby On Rails framework before Ruby did, they could have made inroads in to the web development community. That is, of course, if you could somehow get developers to embrace all the parenthesis, which seem to be an albatross around Lisp's neck that it can never shake. Lisp does have one killer app, though: Emacs.
- konjin 6y ago
  They did. It was called org-babel. It is still superior to notebooks because you can weave the source code and mix a dozen languages.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I love org, but this is really not nearly the same as Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter notebooks are web based, and only require a web browser to use. That's not the case for org. Using org effectively also means using Emacs, which is a high barrier of entry for most people. Jupyter notebooks have no such requirements, and anyone can get rolling by just installing some packages and opening a web browser. Jupyter notebooks are also really polished, while org is more bare bones visually. Jupyter notebooks also have all these tools integrated in to it (all the graphing and inline image display tools are particularly appealing) Yes, you could potentially do all of these with org, but it'd take way more knowledge and setup than is required for Jupyter notebooks. If something as visually appealing, powerful, and easy to set up and use for people who don't know Emacs then it'd have a chance of getting widespread adoption. But that's not org.
    - konjin 6y ago
      It's better. Already serialized. Can be kept under version control. Can be shared between people without needing to signup for anything. And as already stated, code is automatically extractable. Notebooks are only a thing because you don't need to install anything on work laptops and get around terrible IT policies.
Rochus 6y ago
Like https://hub.docker.com/r/drmeister/cando/ https://hub.docker.com/r/drmeister/cando/?
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into programming language flamewar. I realize that you're trying to defend something good, but good intentions don't remove the duty to take out name-calling and swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dpc_pw 6y ago

> This might sound harsh, but Common Lisp fans should stop whining about what everybody else is doing and start making some killer apps to bring back some life into their language. They can't. They are all busy implementing another Lisp in Lisp.

agumonkey 6y ago

There's a psychological paradox at play. Many idealistic lispers want a lot of things but they don't play the current game, they (I can include myself partially) care more about the tool than the product and it just dies a quick death. For this to happen they have to turn their view of lisp from beauty to an effective tool to win on pragmatic points: time to develop, number of bugs, ease of adaptability. CL has a hammer for all this points but you have to see the field that way and produce things.. well basically 'less is more' vs 'perfectionism'

pmoriarty 6y ago

As a huge Lisp fan (though more of Scheme than Common Lisp), I kind of agree. If a Lisper had come up with Jupyter notebooks before Python did, they could have captured the interest of academia. If they'd come out with a Ruby On Rails framework before Ruby did, they could have made inroads in to the web development community. That is, of course, if you could somehow get developers to embrace all the parenthesis, which seem to be an albatross around Lisp's neck that it can never shake. Lisp does have one killer app, though: Emacs.

konjin 6y ago
They did. It was called org-babel. It is still superior to notebooks because you can weave the source code and mix a dozen languages.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I love org, but this is really not nearly the same as Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter notebooks are web based, and only require a web browser to use. That's not the case for org. Using org effectively also means using Emacs, which is a high barrier of entry for most people. Jupyter notebooks have no such requirements, and anyone can get rolling by just installing some packages and opening a web browser. Jupyter notebooks are also really polished, while org is more bare bones visually. Jupyter notebooks also have all these tools integrated in to it (all the graphing and inline image display tools are particularly appealing) Yes, you could potentially do all of these with org, but it'd take way more knowledge and setup than is required for Jupyter notebooks. If something as visually appealing, powerful, and easy to set up and use for people who don't know Emacs then it'd have a chance of getting widespread adoption. But that's not org.
  - konjin 6y ago
    It's better. Already serialized. Can be kept under version control. Can be shared between people without needing to signup for anything. And as already stated, code is automatically extractable. Notebooks are only a thing because you don't need to install anything on work laptops and get around terrible IT policies.

Rochus 6y ago

Like https://hub.docker.com/r/drmeister/cando/ https://hub.docker.com/r/drmeister/cando/?

dang 6y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into programming language flamewar. I realize that you're trying to defend something good, but good intentions don't remove the duty to take out name-calling and swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html