5 ms·

Lisp will never be popular. Everyone likes to kiss the ass of Lisp, and talk about how transformative and powerful it is, then they go and write a bunch of Pyt

Lisp will never be popular. Everyone likes to kiss the ass of Lisp, and talk about how transformative and powerful it is, then they go and write a bunch of Python or Ruby or Lua or Perl or anything other than Lisp, because infix is just much much more readable. When was the last time you went to a math class and the professor wasn't using infix notation? Even the Common Lisp Hyperspec has to resort to infix notation to explain things. Look at all the infix notation: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_c.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_... Otherwise, this is pretty spot on. I would say that XML databases should be replaced with JSON or schemaless databases (there was no json back then) and then this prediction is spot on as well.

larrywright 14y ago
Clojure is a Lisp and has been rising in popularity. I don't know if it is in the top 10, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was in the next few years.
- diego 14y ago
  It's #23 on Github, ahead of Go and Erlang. I think top 10 is a tall order but not impossible. https://github.com/languages/Clojure https://github.com/languages/Clojure
lkrubner 14y ago
I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the first person in this company to use Clojure, (although there is a small team in London that now uses Scala, and there is an official goal to move toward JVM technologies). I use it because it lets me work very fast. I have spent many years writing Ruby and PHP. I used to use them because I thought they were fast, and Java was slow. But one's point of reference shapes one's preferences. Let me put it like this: I started using PHP in 1999. At that time, I felt strongly that this was the easiest way to write web apps. Java was verbose. The Struts framework was monstrous to the point of being offensive. Perl was ugly. I had never heard of Ruby. I became an evangelist for PHP, trying to convince companies that its use would make web development much more pleasant and faster. Later I did some Ruby On Rails development. I like this language, though I have never understood the smug sense of superiority of some Rails developers, especially in their attitude toward PHP. In my mind, these are 2 similar languages with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but at roughly the same level of power. PHP was for a long time a Wild West of development. Every developer built their own CMS and then used it for everything. At some point after 2006, this changed. Ruby On Rails was a huge influence. By 2008, the only jobs I could find, for either Ruby or PHP, were using monolithic frameworks: Rails, Symfony, Drupal or Cake. I found myself bogged down reading endless documentation. I recall losing whole days trying to track down a bug in Symfony and then finding it was because of a setting in an obscure YAML file. The situation was not as bad as Struts, but I felt that somehow the world had taken a wrong turn. Once upon a time lightweight scripting languages offered freedom from Java and Struts -- and when you make that comparison, both Ruby and PHP seem like heaven. Bruce Eckel summed up the spirit of the change here: "But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system The 2 work in combination of course. When I got done with my 2 week assignment, which I did in 1 week, I ran "lein uberjar" and gave a single binary to the sysadmin, so he could roll it out to the production machines. He asked where the other files were. I said "There are no other files, all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and code are in this one file." He asked how to start it. I gave him a simple 1 line startup command. He started it up and was amazed. He said, "That's it?" I said, "That's it." He said "Why can't they all be this easy?" He was used to dealing with complicated Capistrano and Jenkins commands for roll-outs. To me, Clojure has that simplicity, speed and elegance that I was looking for in 1999, when I stumbled on PHP and decided PHP was the wave of the future. I suspect the Great Age Of Lisp is still ahead of us. Stuff like Clojure makes me think there is a vast potential here, still waiting to be unlocked.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- justin_vanw 14y ago
  So, if I were to do your two week assignment in one day, in C, would that mean that C is much better than Clojure? What if I gave your Sysadmin a make file that would build a Debian package or RPM package rather than expecting him to maintain some complex and silly deployments system? The sysadmin would be my new best friend, but would that imply that the language I used was better? You are doing some seriously sloppy thinking here.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I have to disagree - he was talking about the eco-system of clojure as well as the language. We do get mixed up with complicated frameworks at the expense of simple (dare I say composable) solutions. Clojure is small and simple enough that it has not yet had the weight of working in a thousand different environments imposed on it.
  - lkrubner 14y ago
    As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote: To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.
  - lkrubner 14y ago
    As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote: To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.
rntz 14y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any infix notation on the linked page.
- justin_vanw 14y ago
  (car x) == (first x) (car nil) => NIL Shouldn't they say, for example: (eq (car x) (first x)) Sure, it's the same, both imply a test for equality or in this case an assertion of equality. However, '==' is not part of this language and there is reason to use it other than the alternative is less obvious and clear.
  - pg 14y ago
    No, you're confusing expressions with metanotation. Using infix metanotation to describe Lisp semantics is a convention that goes back to McCarthy.
  - bcoates 14y ago
    It's pretty universal to use syntax that's outside the domain of the language being described to describe a language in it's specification, otherwise your head would explode trying to distinguish the example from the rule. The C++ standard uses tables for the equivalent purpose, not C++ declarations, like at §23.2.1 in C++11. Does this mean that C++ should move from header files to an RDBMS?
  - jonpeda 14y ago
    eq == == This is true in both infix notation and in prefix notation.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
pg 14y ago
The mistake here is the "everyone." I agree that infix is easier for some math, but otherwise I genuinely prefer prefix, and I'm not the only one. So the question now is, are those of us who have no problem with prefix notation merely a random minority of the population, like people who are left-handed, or are we a minority like say the minority who are good at math, or the minority who used the Internet in 1995? I'm not saying for sure we are. Even after all these years, I still can't say for sure whether ordinary programmers will ever be able to deal with prefix notation. But I also don't feel it's safe to dismiss the possibility.
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  I've always thought that the ease with which I picked up prefix notation had to do with the amount of time I spent using HP RPN calculators as a teenager. Postfix and prefix are not that different. But RPN calculators are harder to find these days, I think.

larrywright 14y ago

Clojure is a Lisp and has been rising in popularity. I don't know if it is in the top 10, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was in the next few years.

diego 14y ago
It's #23 on Github, ahead of Go and Erlang. I think top 10 is a tall order but not impossible. https://github.com/languages/Clojure https://github.com/languages/Clojure

lkrubner 14y ago

I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the first person in this company to use Clojure, (although there is a small team in London that now uses Scala, and there is an official goal to move toward JVM technologies). I use it because it lets me work very fast. I have spent many years writing Ruby and PHP. I used to use them because I thought they were fast, and Java was slow. But one's point of reference shapes one's preferences. Let me put it like this: I started using PHP in 1999. At that time, I felt strongly that this was the easiest way to write web apps. Java was verbose. The Struts framework was monstrous to the point of being offensive. Perl was ugly. I had never heard of Ruby. I became an evangelist for PHP, trying to convince companies that its use would make web development much more pleasant and faster. Later I did some Ruby On Rails development. I like this language, though I have never understood the smug sense of superiority of some Rails developers, especially in their attitude toward PHP. In my mind, these are 2 similar languages with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but at roughly the same level of power. PHP was for a long time a Wild West of development. Every developer built their own CMS and then used it for everything. At some point after 2006, this changed. Ruby On Rails was a huge influence. By 2008, the only jobs I could find, for either Ruby or PHP, were using monolithic frameworks: Rails, Symfony, Drupal or Cake. I found myself bogged down reading endless documentation. I recall losing whole days trying to track down a bug in Symfony and then finding it was because of a setting in an obscure YAML file. The situation was not as bad as Struts, but I felt that somehow the world had taken a wrong turn. Once upon a time lightweight scripting languages offered freedom from Java and Struts -- and when you make that comparison, both Ruby and PHP seem like heaven. Bruce Eckel summed up the spirit of the change here: "But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system The 2 work in combination of course. When I got done with my 2 week assignment, which I did in 1 week, I ran "lein uberjar" and gave a single binary to the sysadmin, so he could roll it out to the production machines. He asked where the other files were. I said "There are no other files, all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and code are in this one file." He asked how to start it. I gave him a simple 1 line startup command. He started it up and was amazed. He said, "That's it?" I said, "That's it." He said "Why can't they all be this easy?" He was used to dealing with complicated Capistrano and Jenkins commands for roll-outs. To me, Clojure has that simplicity, speed and elegance that I was looking for in 1999, when I stumbled on PHP and decided PHP was the wave of the future. I suspect the Great Age Of Lisp is still ahead of us. Stuff like Clojure makes me think there is a vast potential here, still waiting to be unlocked.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
justin_vanw 14y ago
So, if I were to do your two week assignment in one day, in C, would that mean that C is much better than Clojure? What if I gave your Sysadmin a make file that would build a Debian package or RPM package rather than expecting him to maintain some complex and silly deployments system? The sysadmin would be my new best friend, but would that imply that the language I used was better? You are doing some seriously sloppy thinking here.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I have to disagree - he was talking about the eco-system of clojure as well as the language. We do get mixed up with complicated frameworks at the expense of simple (dare I say composable) solutions. Clojure is small and simple enough that it has not yet had the weight of working in a thousand different environments imposed on it.
- lkrubner 14y ago
  As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote: To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.
- lkrubner 14y ago
  As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote: To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.

rntz 14y ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any infix notation on the linked page.

justin_vanw 14y ago
(car x) == (first x) (car nil) => NIL Shouldn't they say, for example: (eq (car x) (first x)) Sure, it's the same, both imply a test for equality or in this case an assertion of equality. However, '==' is not part of this language and there is reason to use it other than the alternative is less obvious and clear.
- pg 14y ago
  No, you're confusing expressions with metanotation. Using infix metanotation to describe Lisp semantics is a convention that goes back to McCarthy.
- bcoates 14y ago
  It's pretty universal to use syntax that's outside the domain of the language being described to describe a language in it's specification, otherwise your head would explode trying to distinguish the example from the rule. The C++ standard uses tables for the equivalent purpose, not C++ declarations, like at §23.2.1 in C++11. Does this mean that C++ should move from header files to an RDBMS?
- jonpeda 14y ago
  eq == == This is true in both infix notation and in prefix notation.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

pg 14y ago

The mistake here is the "everyone." I agree that infix is easier for some math, but otherwise I genuinely prefer prefix, and I'm not the only one. So the question now is, are those of us who have no problem with prefix notation merely a random minority of the population, like people who are left-handed, or are we a minority like say the minority who are good at math, or the minority who used the Internet in 1995? I'm not saying for sure we are. Even after all these years, I still can't say for sure whether ordinary programmers will ever be able to deal with prefix notation. But I also don't feel it's safe to dismiss the possibility.

ScottBurson 14y ago
I've always thought that the ease with which I picked up prefix notation had to do with the amount of time I spent using HP RPN calculators as a teenager. Postfix and prefix are not that different. But RPN calculators are harder to find these days, I think.