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The historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C. https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp-in-20#g3OvGgqVhOBjyNwDMx4

The historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C. https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp-in-20#g3OvGgqVhOBjyNwDMx4C https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp...

lacrimacida 3y ago
Haha, no. Modern PLs have reached parity with Lisps but comparing C and Lisp is apples and oranges. C was fast no doubt but much lower level than LISP and served a different purpose. And then you proceed to link someone’s comment as a reference? Nobody is trying to convince you to use Lisp, it’s just free books you could learn from if interested. The hostility is hard to understand.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Their point was that the "superpowers" and mythology of Lisp come from a time (the 80s) in which C was the primary alternative, popular language. Standard ML came later and the further MLs in OCaml and F# came much, much later. Erlang was proprietary. Prolog was around but misunderstood and remains so. Smalltalk was there and super powerful (maybe moreso?), but as far as I understand, kept to certain machines. But now we have Elixir, Erlang, F#, OCaml, Scala, Racket, Chez Scheme, Gerbil Scheme, Chicken Scheme, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Pharo, etc. all competing with the standardized Lisp in Common Lisp. I love Lisp, or rather Scheme and its ilk, but the point is that its mythology comes from the 80s and early 90s in which it did sort of set the standard for modern languages. It's really a fantastic family of languages, but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial alternatives to the other languages it has heavily inspired. It seems Clojure and Racket come close, and Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    >Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion. In what ways? Asking as Lisp newbie.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      It's mainly that the core editor is Emacs or proprietary ones that have indeterminate futures, there are different implementations that are incompatible for things not defined in the standard, such as for GUIs, not a well defined and vibrant ecosystem or community, the package system is strange, and other things of this nature. As a language, I think it has a bit of cruft from being a mismash of everyone's favorite features from all the Lisps around the time that the standard was created. I find that it is hard to read, and this is coming from someone who likes Schemes and doesn't care about parentheses. Furthermore, you will struggle finding a job. Although admittedly, the jobs you do find may be cool. But they may also be giant balls of mud, which is my main impression and true from what I have read. I think for personal or dedicated use cases within a larger system it is probably awesome. For example, I believe the CLR (.NET) garbage collector was generated via Common Lisp code. I personally use other languages for my personal projects, namely F# and Elixir, and when I want to reach for a Lisp/Scheme, I choose Racket. I find Scheme a more focused language. I don't think I'll ever have the time to actually understand things like CLOS and the metaobject protocol in Common Lisp. The condition system seems pretty cool. I have practically every Lisp book there is, and certainly all the major ones. I just can't get into it, and when I try, it just feels like it's stuck in the past as an ecosystem, and I revert to Scheme or another language. The notebooks in F# and Elixir are gamechangers, in my opinion, for learning, going through books, and even production uses. The various Common Lisp books are awesome, but I use F#, Elixir, and Racket when working through the bits I do write code for.
      - vindarel 3y ago
        Today other editors have good to very good support, such as Vim or Atom/Pulsar: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... the VSCode plugin is here and evolving, we can use Jupyter notebooks, and even a very cool editor written in CL, working out of the box for CL and other languages with its built-in LSP client, Lem.
      - eadmund 3y ago
        > It's mainly that the core editor is Emacs What’s the problem with that? Emacs is, on balance, the best editor and ecosystem. Nothing else comes close, and time spent on anything else is ultimately wasted. > I don't think I'll ever have the time to actually understand things like CLOS and the metaobject protocol in Common Lisp. They are really worth considering. I have found that the longer I use them, the wiser the decisions they encode were. > The condition system seems pretty cool. It really is. The more you get used to it, the more intolerable it is that other languages don’t provide something similar out of the box. Common Lisp isn’t perfect, of course. It has some very real flaws! But at the end of the day, nothing else matches it, even though over the past three decades the baseline language has gotten closer. Garbage collection was a huge win on the past. Gradual typing, too. But the baseline language of today still doesn’t have macros. It still doesn’t have something approaching CLOS, let alone the MOP. Almost no languages have reasonable condition handling. In a ton of ways, Common Lisp is an improvement on its successors.
  - vindarel 3y ago
    > but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial disagree ;) This industrial language is Common Lisp. Some industrial uses: - http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html - https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ - https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/ Example companies: Intel's programmable chips, the ACL2 theorem prover (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.0399 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.039...), urban transportation planning systems (SISCOG), Quantum Computing (HRL Labs, Rigetti…), big data financial analysis (Ravenpack, they might be hiring), Google, Boeing, the NASA, etc. ps: Python competing? strong disagree^^ (edit) on using a CL library that adds Haskell-like type checking on top of CL to develop an industrial quantum compiler: https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/ https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/
    - bmitc 3y ago
      Those industrial use lists are way out of date though. Many of the companies don't exist anymore, last I checked. And the presence of companies using Common Lisp doesn't really negate my comment. It certainly has its niches, which is probably what it is best at. But I highly doubt one could convince, at the outset of the project, a company that chose Elixir to instead use Common Lisp, for example. There are lots of companies actively using Elixir. > ps: Python competing? strong disagree^^ I pretty strongly dislike Python, but we have to admit that any language today is competing against it in terms of mindshare, despite several languages being much better designed.
  - lispm 3y ago
    An example: I bought a slick application for macOS & Windows: OpusModus ( https://opusmodus.com https://opusmodus.com ). It's a Lisp IDE tailored for algorithmic Music composition. The Mac version is just a normal desktop app in the Applications folder. It automatically runs on Intel and Apple Silicon, natively. Upon download it is expanded to a Mac application. It has a native user interface. For sound generation it can use a Lisp library which compiles sound generators to C, which then get compiled by Xcode and loaded into Lisp all at runtime. Typically it talks via Midi to other applications (Logic, Mainstage, Ableton, ...). It creates nice looking scores... There is also a Windows application, with the same features, native code & native UI, ... I find that pretty cool for a language & application which is super niche. OpusModus 3 is written in LispWorks (first released end 80s on Unix machines), a commercial Common Lisp, which can be used for such Desktop applications.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      That is indeed an impressive application. Thank you for sharing. (I'm having trouble with the website on a tablet though.) Is there any talk where the author describes it?
      - lispm 3y ago
        I would propose to watch the linked Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoHE96rh7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoHE96rh7w It's actually several people working on it. Yes, one can develop Lisp software with more than one person. ;-)
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    During the 80's C was hardly the primary alternative to anything outside UNIX.

lacrimacida 3y ago

Haha, no. Modern PLs have reached parity with Lisps but comparing C and Lisp is apples and oranges. C was fast no doubt but much lower level than LISP and served a different purpose. And then you proceed to link someone’s comment as a reference? Nobody is trying to convince you to use Lisp, it’s just free books you could learn from if interested. The hostility is hard to understand.

bmitc 3y ago
Their point was that the "superpowers" and mythology of Lisp come from a time (the 80s) in which C was the primary alternative, popular language. Standard ML came later and the further MLs in OCaml and F# came much, much later. Erlang was proprietary. Prolog was around but misunderstood and remains so. Smalltalk was there and super powerful (maybe moreso?), but as far as I understand, kept to certain machines. But now we have Elixir, Erlang, F#, OCaml, Scala, Racket, Chez Scheme, Gerbil Scheme, Chicken Scheme, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Pharo, etc. all competing with the standardized Lisp in Common Lisp. I love Lisp, or rather Scheme and its ilk, but the point is that its mythology comes from the 80s and early 90s in which it did sort of set the standard for modern languages. It's really a fantastic family of languages, but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial alternatives to the other languages it has heavily inspired. It seems Clojure and Racket come close, and Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion. In what ways? Asking as Lisp newbie.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    It's mainly that the core editor is Emacs or proprietary ones that have indeterminate futures, there are different implementations that are incompatible for things not defined in the standard, such as for GUIs, not a well defined and vibrant ecosystem or community, the package system is strange, and other things of this nature. As a language, I think it has a bit of cruft from being a mismash of everyone's favorite features from all the Lisps around the time that the standard was created. I find that it is hard to read, and this is coming from someone who likes Schemes and doesn't care about parentheses. Furthermore, you will struggle finding a job. Although admittedly, the jobs you do find may be cool. But they may also be giant balls of mud, which is my main impression and true from what I have read. I think for personal or dedicated use cases within a larger system it is probably awesome. For example, I believe the CLR (.NET) garbage collector was generated via Common Lisp code. I personally use other languages for my personal projects, namely F# and Elixir, and when I want to reach for a Lisp/Scheme, I choose Racket. I find Scheme a more focused language. I don't think I'll ever have the time to actually understand things like CLOS and the metaobject protocol in Common Lisp. The condition system seems pretty cool. I have practically every Lisp book there is, and certainly all the major ones. I just can't get into it, and when I try, it just feels like it's stuck in the past as an ecosystem, and I revert to Scheme or another language. The notebooks in F# and Elixir are gamechangers, in my opinion, for learning, going through books, and even production uses. The various Common Lisp books are awesome, but I use F#, Elixir, and Racket when working through the bits I do write code for.
    - vindarel 3y ago
      Today other editors have good to very good support, such as Vim or Atom/Pulsar: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... the VSCode plugin is here and evolving, we can use Jupyter notebooks, and even a very cool editor written in CL, working out of the box for CL and other languages with its built-in LSP client, Lem.
    - eadmund 3y ago
      > It's mainly that the core editor is Emacs What’s the problem with that? Emacs is, on balance, the best editor and ecosystem. Nothing else comes close, and time spent on anything else is ultimately wasted. > I don't think I'll ever have the time to actually understand things like CLOS and the metaobject protocol in Common Lisp. They are really worth considering. I have found that the longer I use them, the wiser the decisions they encode were. > The condition system seems pretty cool. It really is. The more you get used to it, the more intolerable it is that other languages don’t provide something similar out of the box. Common Lisp isn’t perfect, of course. It has some very real flaws! But at the end of the day, nothing else matches it, even though over the past three decades the baseline language has gotten closer. Garbage collection was a huge win on the past. Gradual typing, too. But the baseline language of today still doesn’t have macros. It still doesn’t have something approaching CLOS, let alone the MOP. Almost no languages have reasonable condition handling. In a ton of ways, Common Lisp is an improvement on its successors.
- vindarel 3y ago
  > but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial disagree ;) This industrial language is Common Lisp. Some industrial uses: - http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html - https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ - https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/ Example companies: Intel's programmable chips, the ACL2 theorem prover (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.0399 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.039...), urban transportation planning systems (SISCOG), Quantum Computing (HRL Labs, Rigetti…), big data financial analysis (Ravenpack, they might be hiring), Google, Boeing, the NASA, etc. ps: Python competing? strong disagree^^ (edit) on using a CL library that adds Haskell-like type checking on top of CL to develop an industrial quantum compiler: https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/ https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Those industrial use lists are way out of date though. Many of the companies don't exist anymore, last I checked. And the presence of companies using Common Lisp doesn't really negate my comment. It certainly has its niches, which is probably what it is best at. But I highly doubt one could convince, at the outset of the project, a company that chose Elixir to instead use Common Lisp, for example. There are lots of companies actively using Elixir. > ps: Python competing? strong disagree^^ I pretty strongly dislike Python, but we have to admit that any language today is competing against it in terms of mindshare, despite several languages being much better designed.
- lispm 3y ago
  An example: I bought a slick application for macOS & Windows: OpusModus ( https://opusmodus.com https://opusmodus.com ). It's a Lisp IDE tailored for algorithmic Music composition. The Mac version is just a normal desktop app in the Applications folder. It automatically runs on Intel and Apple Silicon, natively. Upon download it is expanded to a Mac application. It has a native user interface. For sound generation it can use a Lisp library which compiles sound generators to C, which then get compiled by Xcode and loaded into Lisp all at runtime. Typically it talks via Midi to other applications (Logic, Mainstage, Ableton, ...). It creates nice looking scores... There is also a Windows application, with the same features, native code & native UI, ... I find that pretty cool for a language & application which is super niche. OpusModus 3 is written in LispWorks (first released end 80s on Unix machines), a commercial Common Lisp, which can be used for such Desktop applications.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    That is indeed an impressive application. Thank you for sharing. (I'm having trouble with the website on a tablet though.) Is there any talk where the author describes it?
    - lispm 3y ago
      I would propose to watch the linked Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoHE96rh7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoHE96rh7w It's actually several people working on it. Yes, one can develop Lisp software with more than one person. ;-)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  During the 80's C was hardly the primary alternative to anything outside UNIX.