7 ms·

Has any lisp like language become popular ? I think the most popular was Dylan and o know the racket team is doing something similar.

flowcont 3y ago
Clojure?
mepian 3y ago
Dylan was never really popular. As far as I know, Common Lisp had the largest number of users, maybe Clojure eclipsed it by now.
gpderetta 3y ago
elisp :D
- bjoli 3y ago
  "many users" and "popular" don't always overlap.
  - notacoward 3y ago
    Etymologically, they sure do. For all of its warts, elisp has not only many users but many programmers who have created some pretty complicated stuff. It's definitely a contender.
    - bjoli 3y ago
      Popular has many meanings. If one takes popular to mean done/used by many then sure. You are right. Filing tax returns is popular by the same definition. If you mean popular as in the antonym of unpopular I don't think elisp can be called popular. I have written several thousand lines of elisp outside of my Emacs config, and it is probably my least favourite lisp - and I believe most people who know more lisps than elisp think like I do.
klibertp 3y ago
Well, historically and technically, Lisps already became popular half a century ago, then they fell from grace. Also, depends on your definition of popularity: anything outside of Top 10 on TIOBE looks like a rounding error compared to the big guys. Dylan was a great language - I played with OpenDylan a bit. Scheme with CLOS and gradual typing, and a formal specification, and a stdlib, and tools for modularizing and AOT compiling and linking multi-module projects, hygienic (syntax-case-style) macros, and so on, all in ca. '95! It was a bit too late and Java took over the world before Dylan had its chance... Imagine the world, full of sunshine and rainbows, if Dylan prevailed - instead of the dreary, stifling, primitive language we all know and love (to hate). Racket is doing nothing similar to Dylan. Dylan was a well defined language for programming in the large and targeted at enterprises. Racket is a laboratory and a workbench for creating languages. It accomplishes this by implementing incredibly powerful macro and module systems. Other notable features of Racket are delimited continuations, contracts, and the Typed Racket dialect. It is targeted at researchers and beginners and has nothing to do with the enterprise. :)
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > depends on your definition of popularity I'm a Common Lisp fan, but nobody would claim that it is popular. I don't know that "popularity" is as subjective as you describe.
  - klibertp 3y ago
    Kotlin is widely popular, official language for one of the two dominant mobile platforms. It accounts for 0.37% of all search results gathered by TIOBE. Meanwhile, languages on the first 4 positions account for more than 50% of hits. Languages like PHP or Go, which you can still call pretty popular are on the order of 1-2 %. It's completely subjective. The objective metrics (if web search are them, which is kind of dubious) tell us that whatever-language-you-like is probably orders of magnitude less popular than Fortran. The "real" popularity that you experience - how big the community is, how many packages are published, how many success stories are there - heavily depend on where you are, who you know, and what you want. The index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
ofrzeta 3y ago
Maybe AutoLISP :) (the built-in LISP dialect in AutoCAD)
JonChesterfield 3y ago
There's a weird one called javascript that seems to have picked up some fans

flowcont 3y ago

Clojure?

mepian 3y ago

Dylan was never really popular. As far as I know, Common Lisp had the largest number of users, maybe Clojure eclipsed it by now.

gpderetta 3y ago

elisp :D

bjoli 3y ago
"many users" and "popular" don't always overlap.
- notacoward 3y ago
  Etymologically, they sure do. For all of its warts, elisp has not only many users but many programmers who have created some pretty complicated stuff. It's definitely a contender.
  - bjoli 3y ago
    Popular has many meanings. If one takes popular to mean done/used by many then sure. You are right. Filing tax returns is popular by the same definition. If you mean popular as in the antonym of unpopular I don't think elisp can be called popular. I have written several thousand lines of elisp outside of my Emacs config, and it is probably my least favourite lisp - and I believe most people who know more lisps than elisp think like I do.

klibertp 3y ago

Well, historically and technically, Lisps already became popular half a century ago, then they fell from grace. Also, depends on your definition of popularity: anything outside of Top 10 on TIOBE looks like a rounding error compared to the big guys. Dylan was a great language - I played with OpenDylan a bit. Scheme with CLOS and gradual typing, and a formal specification, and a stdlib, and tools for modularizing and AOT compiling and linking multi-module projects, hygienic (syntax-case-style) macros, and so on, all in ca. '95! It was a bit too late and Java took over the world before Dylan had its chance... Imagine the world, full of sunshine and rainbows, if Dylan prevailed - instead of the dreary, stifling, primitive language we all know and love (to hate). Racket is doing nothing similar to Dylan. Dylan was a well defined language for programming in the large and targeted at enterprises. Racket is a laboratory and a workbench for creating languages. It accomplishes this by implementing incredibly powerful macro and module systems. Other notable features of Racket are delimited continuations, contracts, and the Typed Racket dialect. It is targeted at researchers and beginners and has nothing to do with the enterprise. :)

andsoitis 3y ago
> depends on your definition of popularity I'm a Common Lisp fan, but nobody would claim that it is popular. I don't know that "popularity" is as subjective as you describe.
- klibertp 3y ago
  Kotlin is widely popular, official language for one of the two dominant mobile platforms. It accounts for 0.37% of all search results gathered by TIOBE. Meanwhile, languages on the first 4 positions account for more than 50% of hits. Languages like PHP or Go, which you can still call pretty popular are on the order of 1-2 %. It's completely subjective. The objective metrics (if web search are them, which is kind of dubious) tell us that whatever-language-you-like is probably orders of magnitude less popular than Fortran. The "real" popularity that you experience - how big the community is, how many packages are published, how many success stories are there - heavily depend on where you are, who you know, and what you want. The index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

ofrzeta 3y ago

Maybe AutoLISP :) (the built-in LISP dialect in AutoCAD)

JonChesterfield 3y ago

There's a weird one called javascript that seems to have picked up some fans