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Lisp has been around since before you were born. If the majority of programmers as are still not comfortable with the language after that long, despite having l
by Stevvo 5y ago
Lisp has been around since before you were born. If the majority of programmers as are still not comfortable with the language after that long, despite having learnt it in college, it suggests the language is fundamentally flawed.
Imagine a blog post titled "Using C in production"; it sounds absurd.
- Jtsummers 5y agoThe majority of programmers did not learn Lisp in college. Most universities don't have it in their curriculum, and if they do the closest is usually a "programming language" course that gives 1-2 weeks of coverage for 5-15 languages.
- lispm 5y agoThat was different when I learned Lisp. Our CS intro courses were either Scheme + something else or even Common Lisp + Ada. Basically every CS student at the local university had exposure to either Scheme or Lisp then. There were a bunch of research projects that were mostly using Lisp: advanced chat systems, image processing, planning, diagnosis, route planning, music theory, ...
- Jtsummers 5y agoI'm not sure if that's supposed to be a counterargument or not. I mean, MIT taught SICP for over 20 years with Scheme before dropping it. So it may be true that a majority of MIT trained programmers learned a Lisp in college. But that's not the typical experience across universities, and I doubt it ever was the case that the majority of universities taught the majority of their CS students with a mandatory Lisp course (that is, a course beyond the survey-style course I mentioned before, which seems to be far more common course). Even top universities didn't require it. Georgia Tech, one of the top technical universities in the US, did something like a 2-year stint with a mandatory SICP course before dropping it in favor of Python (IIRC), and had no mandatory Lisp course besides that (though they did have a mandatory Smalltalk course at the time).
- mbrodersen 5y agoOne data point for your consideration: I know Lisp well and choose not to use it.
- Jtsummers 5y agoAnd? I was responding to the OP's absurdist claim that the majority of programmers learned Lisp in college. They then tried to use that same absurdist claim to draw a conclusion which is, in a word, moronic.
- mbrodersen 5y agoThe majority of programmers did not learn JS in college. And yet JS rules.
- wglb 5y agoFortran and COBOL are also very old, but, while they are used in production, not many new programmers choose to use it.