3 ms·

"If you program long enough, you come to realize that there is no “one language to rule them all”" Than you program some more and, if you're smart, you realize

"If you program long enough, you come to realize that there is no “one language to rule them all”" Than you program some more and, if you're smart, you realize there's Common Lisp.

dpkendal 14y ago
Except that Common Lisp is a kludge, a relic, and a sad victim of 30-year–old compromises. It's also practically abandonware, with no new specification since 1994's ANSI Common Lisp. (Itself mainly clarifications to CLtL2.) Modern Lisps — of which Clojure is currently the leader of the pack — would be a far better choice today.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Not to start a Lisp-vs-Lisp side-conversation here, but if we're going to go with a 'modern' Lisp, I'd prefer one that doesn't add syntax and which supports proper tail-call elimination. It's not like we have a lack of those, either - Racket's my personal favorite; aside from the robust standard library, the scoped languages give me hope that the 'Lisp curse' has finally been reversed.
tikhonj 14y ago
And then later you come across Haskell :P. Everything you could possibly want in a language, and far less wish-washy than the rest; a perfect testament to the fact that theory and practice are not at cross purposes. Sure it's not perfect, but I posit that it's a local maximum for most tasks.
daurnimator 14y ago
And then you have to use javascript to do some front end web development.
batista 14y ago
>Than you program some more and, if you're smart, you realize there's Common Lisp. And then you realize, oh, it was just "premature realisation", actually Common Lisp is not the one "to rule them all" after all. E.g it's useless for most embedded work, a non started on the web client side, you cannot find many programmers to hire for your project, a lot of self proclaimed Lisp programmers are just dabblers, there are not enough available libs for lots of fields (, scientific computing, GUI, multimedia etc), and a thousand other reasons. Oh, and no killer app was been made in Common Lisp, or any Lisp for that matter, with the exception of Emacs (but that one is targeted to developers anyway). In fact, the most famous example of Lisp "success" is a mid-nineties startup that was sold to Yahoo.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Well, there's ITA Software. And arguably AutoCAD.
  - batista 14y ago
    Well, as for AutoCAD: The language was introduced in AutoCAD Version 2.18 in January 1986, and continued to be enhanced in successive releases up to Release 13 in February 1995. _After that, its development was neglected by Autodesk in favor of more fashionable development environments like VBA, .NET and ObjectARX. However, it has remained AutoCAD's primary user customization language._ So it looks like it has been dead for 17 years.

"If you program long enough, you come to realize that there is no “one language to rule them all”" Than you program some more and, if you're smart, you realize there's Common Lisp.

dpkendal 14y ago

Except that Common Lisp is a kludge, a relic, and a sad victim of 30-year–old compromises. It's also practically abandonware, with no new specification since 1994's ANSI Common Lisp. (Itself mainly clarifications to CLtL2.) Modern Lisps — of which Clojure is currently the leader of the pack — would be a far better choice today.

chimeracoder 14y ago
Not to start a Lisp-vs-Lisp side-conversation here, but if we're going to go with a 'modern' Lisp, I'd prefer one that doesn't add syntax and which supports proper tail-call elimination. It's not like we have a lack of those, either - Racket's my personal favorite; aside from the robust standard library, the scoped languages give me hope that the 'Lisp curse' has finally been reversed.

tikhonj 14y ago

And then later you come across Haskell :P. Everything you could possibly want in a language, and far less wish-washy than the rest; a perfect testament to the fact that theory and practice are not at cross purposes. Sure it's not perfect, but I posit that it's a local maximum for most tasks.

daurnimator 14y ago

And then you have to use javascript to do some front end web development.

batista 14y ago

>Than you program some more and, if you're smart, you realize there's Common Lisp. And then you realize, oh, it was just "premature realisation", actually Common Lisp is not the one "to rule them all" after all. E.g it's useless for most embedded work, a non started on the web client side, you cannot find many programmers to hire for your project, a lot of self proclaimed Lisp programmers are just dabblers, there are not enough available libs for lots of fields (, scientific computing, GUI, multimedia etc), and a thousand other reasons. Oh, and no killer app was been made in Common Lisp, or any Lisp for that matter, with the exception of Emacs (but that one is targeted to developers anyway). In fact, the most famous example of Lisp "success" is a mid-nineties startup that was sold to Yahoo.

philwelch 14y ago
Well, there's ITA Software. And arguably AutoCAD.
- batista 14y ago
  Well, as for AutoCAD: The language was introduced in AutoCAD Version 2.18 in January 1986, and continued to be enhanced in successive releases up to Release 13 in February 1995. _After that, its development was neglected by Autodesk in favor of more fashionable development environments like VBA, .NET and ObjectARX. However, it has remained AutoCAD's primary user customization language._ So it looks like it has been dead for 17 years.