4 ms·

Main issue is, D is suffering from "Lisp curse" [0]. Read the Lisp curse article, but exchange Lisp for D and you'll have a good idea of the problem. D is very

Main issue is, D is suffering from "Lisp curse" [0]. Read the Lisp curse article, but exchange Lisp for D and you'll have a good idea of the problem. D is very similar to Lisp in many aspects. It's a powerful language which allows you to create your own minilanguage within a language. In Lisp, you'd do it with macros, in D you can use templates. This makes it a secret weapon which appeals to lone wolf programmers, but it makes it harder to interact within a wider community. Similar with the language features. D allows multiple paradigms, as a result, many libraries don't interact well together. Some people code in OOP fashion, some people refuse to use the garbage collector, some people even reject the entire runtime (betterC_mode). [0] http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

kazinator 6y ago
The Lisp Curse is an ignorant diatribe that was written by a (then) junior web developer with no Lisp experience, and has basically been disowned by its author. His request to "please stop submitting this to Hacker News!" should be interpreted in its strongest form; i.e. including comments. It's right there, at the top: the first thing you read. D looks fine. It suffers from the curse that we cannot have 1000 languages be popular simultaneously. Popularity is a game of musical chairs. People who don't get chairs when the music stops are not always the clumsy ones who lack athleticism and reflexes. Sometimes, in that crucial moment, the nimble one is just far from the closet chair relative to the klutz whose butt is inches from the seat. In popular culture, popularity wanes fairly quickly. Yesterday's idol is quickly forgotten. Like Billy Joel's line in "The Entertainer": "But I know the game, you'll forget my name / I won't be here in another year / If I don't stay on the charts." In computing, we can't swap tools quite that fast. So for fairly long periods of time, popularity begets more popularity. Something is popular today because it rose to popularity some years ago. (Some things have longer cycles, some shorter.) Anyway, that alone creates a barrier to entry, similar to a monopolistic barrier. No matter how good something is that you create, it just doesn't have ... the popularity to make it popular.
- appleflaxen 6y ago
  > junior web developer with no Lisp experience, > and has basically been disowned by its author. I see the comment at the top about not re-submitting to HN, but I don't see disownership or disavowal. Is it posted somewhere? Because asking not to resubmit (which GP didn't), is not the same thing as saying "my conclusions were wrong".
mattarm 6y ago
The Lisp Curse essay is an interesting read. I don't think I agree with its basic conclusion that language flexibility leads to a kind of social problem akin to a "curse." From what I've seen over my career, both C and C++, which the essay claims are not cursed, have many libraries that don't interoperate well, re-invent wheels, are under documented, solve only part of a problem, and are basically solo/hobby efforts. In every job, the first thing I have to learn is how I'm allowed to write C or C++ at the company, since each provides such a huge surface. The difference between C/C++ and Lisp/D is, I think, not language flexibility. They are all incredibly complex and flexible languages in their own way. The difference is funding and critical mass. C and C++ persist because companies pay people to use them and to improve them. Or, in terms of the curse essay, companies pay people to cooperate. The result is an enduring dominance. Those languages work better because more people use and improve them, so they stay relevant. Neither Lisp nor D seem to benefit significantly from that, so you have what is left: people without the time or interest in producing truly polished solutions.
- kazinator 6y ago
  C came from the Unix environment, gained momentum in the 1980's. The 1980's was a time when microcomputers exploded. Unfortunately, these microcomputers only had the memory and CPU power of big iron from 25 years before that. The best applications and games for these machines were written by assembly language wizards. The C language played right into that. C came from an environment of "mid-grade iron" from about ten years before that. It was developed for the efficient programming of machines that Unix ran on, which were roughly similar in power to the consumer-grade microcomputers of the 1980's. There were tools like Pascal and Modula also, but C came shrouded with a naive mystique thanks to its cryptic syntax, reputation for bending to the programmer, and creds due to its Unix connection. Naive programmers believed that expressions like i++ were faster than i := i + 1, or else, in any case, they liked it better. Moreover, in some situations, an expression stuffed with side effects in C would actually generate better code than less densely coded equivalent (the only equivalent available in a Pascal family language), due to the limitations of compiler capability. Coders whose ego was built on writing big programs in assembly language and getting them debugged were less threatened by a cryptic language in which you could write programs that were hard to understand, and those used to macro assemblers would also have liked the preprocessor. The ability to abuse the language to get the compiler to do what you want also would have helped. "C gets out of the way so you can get the machine to do what you mean (unlike those other things from the Wirthian family). Before there was an ANSI standard, that would have applied double. The printf function with its format strings also blew away Pascal and Fortran. On the latter point, I started to learn C at about the same time I enrolled in engineering. There was a mandatory Fortran course in the engineering curriculum. In one of the assignments, I wanted the Fortran program to have numeric output with dynamic column widths. It was really difficult; I can't remember whether I even got it working. I also remember the issue that Fortran's output would replace a fixed field with * characters when the value would not fit, instead of just expanding it. A few months later when I was learning C, I made it a point to try to do that with printf. Wow, I was easily able to do that. I was thinking, why would anyone use Fortran for number crunching if we have C?

kazinator 6y ago

The Lisp Curse is an ignorant diatribe that was written by a (then) junior web developer with no Lisp experience, and has basically been disowned by its author. His request to "please stop submitting this to Hacker News!" should be interpreted in its strongest form; i.e. including comments. It's right there, at the top: the first thing you read. D looks fine. It suffers from the curse that we cannot have 1000 languages be popular simultaneously. Popularity is a game of musical chairs. People who don't get chairs when the music stops are not always the clumsy ones who lack athleticism and reflexes. Sometimes, in that crucial moment, the nimble one is just far from the closet chair relative to the klutz whose butt is inches from the seat. In popular culture, popularity wanes fairly quickly. Yesterday's idol is quickly forgotten. Like Billy Joel's line in "The Entertainer": "But I know the game, you'll forget my name / I won't be here in another year / If I don't stay on the charts." In computing, we can't swap tools quite that fast. So for fairly long periods of time, popularity begets more popularity. Something is popular today because it rose to popularity some years ago. (Some things have longer cycles, some shorter.) Anyway, that alone creates a barrier to entry, similar to a monopolistic barrier. No matter how good something is that you create, it just doesn't have ... the popularity to make it popular.

appleflaxen 6y ago
> junior web developer with no Lisp experience, > and has basically been disowned by its author. I see the comment at the top about not re-submitting to HN, but I don't see disownership or disavowal. Is it posted somewhere? Because asking not to resubmit (which GP didn't), is not the same thing as saying "my conclusions were wrong".

mattarm 6y ago

The Lisp Curse essay is an interesting read. I don't think I agree with its basic conclusion that language flexibility leads to a kind of social problem akin to a "curse." From what I've seen over my career, both C and C++, which the essay claims are not cursed, have many libraries that don't interoperate well, re-invent wheels, are under documented, solve only part of a problem, and are basically solo/hobby efforts. In every job, the first thing I have to learn is how I'm allowed to write C or C++ at the company, since each provides such a huge surface. The difference between C/C++ and Lisp/D is, I think, not language flexibility. They are all incredibly complex and flexible languages in their own way. The difference is funding and critical mass. C and C++ persist because companies pay people to use them and to improve them. Or, in terms of the curse essay, companies pay people to cooperate. The result is an enduring dominance. Those languages work better because more people use and improve them, so they stay relevant. Neither Lisp nor D seem to benefit significantly from that, so you have what is left: people without the time or interest in producing truly polished solutions.

kazinator 6y ago
C came from the Unix environment, gained momentum in the 1980's. The 1980's was a time when microcomputers exploded. Unfortunately, these microcomputers only had the memory and CPU power of big iron from 25 years before that. The best applications and games for these machines were written by assembly language wizards. The C language played right into that. C came from an environment of "mid-grade iron" from about ten years before that. It was developed for the efficient programming of machines that Unix ran on, which were roughly similar in power to the consumer-grade microcomputers of the 1980's. There were tools like Pascal and Modula also, but C came shrouded with a naive mystique thanks to its cryptic syntax, reputation for bending to the programmer, and creds due to its Unix connection. Naive programmers believed that expressions like i++ were faster than i := i + 1, or else, in any case, they liked it better. Moreover, in some situations, an expression stuffed with side effects in C would actually generate better code than less densely coded equivalent (the only equivalent available in a Pascal family language), due to the limitations of compiler capability. Coders whose ego was built on writing big programs in assembly language and getting them debugged were less threatened by a cryptic language in which you could write programs that were hard to understand, and those used to macro assemblers would also have liked the preprocessor. The ability to abuse the language to get the compiler to do what you want also would have helped. "C gets out of the way so you can get the machine to do what you mean (unlike those other things from the Wirthian family). Before there was an ANSI standard, that would have applied double. The printf function with its format strings also blew away Pascal and Fortran. On the latter point, I started to learn C at about the same time I enrolled in engineering. There was a mandatory Fortran course in the engineering curriculum. In one of the assignments, I wanted the Fortran program to have numeric output with dynamic column widths. It was really difficult; I can't remember whether I even got it working. I also remember the issue that Fortran's output would replace a fixed field with * characters when the value would not fit, instead of just expanding it. A few months later when I was learning C, I made it a point to try to do that with printf. Wow, I was easily able to do that. I was thinking, why would anyone use Fortran for number crunching if we have C?