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I like Lisp a lot, especially Scheme. It's simple, it's pure, it's expressive, it's powerful, and it's fun to write. If I could, I would use it for most things.

I like Lisp a lot, especially Scheme. It's simple, it's pure, it's expressive, it's powerful, and it's fun to write. If I could, I would use it for most things. I can't convince anyone to use it. They just don't like the look of it, they stumble at the brackets. I know that I can't write something in it and expect other people to use it, build it or maintain it. So I don't use it. And nor does anyone else.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
If they had an actually good IDE for it that was LispWorks I would give it a go. Forcing the overhead of learning CommonLisp, which is actually a fairly big language despite the syntax, on top of learning how to use emacs is a big ask.
- vindarel 3y ago
  Today, Atom/Pulsar, Vim, Jetbrains (new in 2023), Sublime, even VSCode and Lem work fine for CL: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
  - User23 3y ago
    VS Code appears to have serviceable support now too.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    I'll check it out. It half worked last time I did it
pjc50 3y ago
Lisp advocates think that "everything looks the same" is an advantage, whereas most people strive desperately to make things look different in informative ways with syntactic features (e.g. different brackets) and syntax highlighting.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  That's one of the advantages of Clojure: it's lisp-inspired but with different brackets for different data structures.
  - teamonkey 3y ago
    One of the reasons it has those data structures is because it sits on the JVM and to maintain compatibility with Java apps it must use them and provide a syntax for them. That’s a practical choice, of course, but also less of an idiomatic lisp. In (pure) lisp there is only one main data structure and it’s everywhere.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Java doesn’t have maps or whatnot, as proved by many other lisp dialects being written for the JVM. Clojure’s decision was of practical importance and a very good one at that (not everything is a list, especially not semantically)

Capricorn2481 3y ago

If they had an actually good IDE for it that was LispWorks I would give it a go. Forcing the overhead of learning CommonLisp, which is actually a fairly big language despite the syntax, on top of learning how to use emacs is a big ask.

vindarel 3y ago
Today, Atom/Pulsar, Vim, Jetbrains (new in 2023), Sublime, even VSCode and Lem work fine for CL: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
- User23 3y ago
  VS Code appears to have serviceable support now too.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  I'll check it out. It half worked last time I did it

pjc50 3y ago

Lisp advocates think that "everything looks the same" is an advantage, whereas most people strive desperately to make things look different in informative ways with syntactic features (e.g. different brackets) and syntax highlighting.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
That's one of the advantages of Clojure: it's lisp-inspired but with different brackets for different data structures.
- teamonkey 3y ago
  One of the reasons it has those data structures is because it sits on the JVM and to maintain compatibility with Java apps it must use them and provide a syntax for them. That’s a practical choice, of course, but also less of an idiomatic lisp. In (pure) lisp there is only one main data structure and it’s everywhere.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Java doesn’t have maps or whatnot, as proved by many other lisp dialects being written for the JVM. Clojure’s decision was of practical importance and a very good one at that (not everything is a list, especially not semantically)