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Is Rust really capturing mindshare when it's still in Alpha? I've read tons of complaints here on HN over that language. I think that it's impossible to predic

Is Rust really capturing mindshare when it's still in Alpha? I've read tons of complaints here on HN over that language. I think that it's impossible to predict what will be hot or not in the future. You have a zillion frameworks, plug-ins, and languages competing for mindshare, and I ultimately think that no one of these will be 100% dominant. People who like Lisp are going to love working in Lisp no matter what, and those that don't, wont, and it's that simple. You can't expect people who are most comfortable working in Java to move to a Lisp, and you most certainly can't ask a Lisper to do something that looks at all like Java. I think one thing that will stunt Clojure, is the death of SICP at MIT and Berkely. SICP makes and excellent case for immutability and functional programming, and that knowledge is now more difficult to find and teach. I think the semi-movement from RoR programmers testing out Clojure wasn't going to last, and if people thought that RoR programmers were really going to move to Clojure and make it popular, with its lack of frameworks and anti-OO philosophy, they weren't thinking about the situation too well. Regardless, Clojure is the only Lisp that currently has a chance for wider adoption, with Heroku and the JVM.

vosper 14y ago
Are MIT and Berkeley still so influential that stopping teaching SICP could affect the future of Clojure, and Lisps in general? MIT and Berkeley grads as a proportion of all programmers is much lower now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Also, from what I've seen of Rich Hickey's presentations and speeches he's doing a pretty good job making the case for immutability and functional programming.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  Yeah, I think so... It's not so much the idea of the raw number of student who go to those schools, but the thought that other schools look toward them for some direction. If I recall that article from the retired teacher from Berkeley correctly, he used to help other teachers teach SICP and Scheme. I'm going on the assumption that there is some feedback loop going on here, and that without people actually being exposed to Lisp in school, then there is probably going to be less people even aware of Lisp's existence. I wonder how many schools will drop Lisp completely now after MIT and Berkeley dropped it. Now, if Clojure looked like Python, I bet dollars to donuts it would be the number one language in use already.

vosper 14y ago

Are MIT and Berkeley still so influential that stopping teaching SICP could affect the future of Clojure, and Lisps in general? MIT and Berkeley grads as a proportion of all programmers is much lower now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Also, from what I've seen of Rich Hickey's presentations and speeches he's doing a pretty good job making the case for immutability and functional programming.

dizzystar 14y ago
Yeah, I think so... It's not so much the idea of the raw number of student who go to those schools, but the thought that other schools look toward them for some direction. If I recall that article from the retired teacher from Berkeley correctly, he used to help other teachers teach SICP and Scheme. I'm going on the assumption that there is some feedback loop going on here, and that without people actually being exposed to Lisp in school, then there is probably going to be less people even aware of Lisp's existence. I wonder how many schools will drop Lisp completely now after MIT and Berkeley dropped it. Now, if Clojure looked like Python, I bet dollars to donuts it would be the number one language in use already.