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Well, historically and technically, Lisps already became popular half a century ago, then they fell from grace. Also, depends on your definition of popularity:
by 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 agoKotlin 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/
- andsoitis 3y agoSo all programming languages are popular?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klibertp 3y agoMore like all but 5 or 10 are incomparably unpopular... But I'm pretty bad at statistics, so maybe your conclusion is truer.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoI've always been troubled by a popularity metric that rewards a language for attracting a lot of novices who need help with it more often. I care more what experts use, but there isn't as much incentive for them to tell us.