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I think it depends how you measure popularity. For example at my work Racket is the most popular Lisp: I use it and no one else ever used or is going to use any

I think it depends how you measure popularity. For example at my work Racket is the most popular Lisp: I use it and no one else ever used or is going to use any other Lisp... :) Racket is a very young language. Until a few (3?) years ago it was a (PLT) Scheme; Scheme has it's uses but they are very specific, nobody would use a Scheme as a general purpose, systems programming language. Racket evolved and is now much more than simply a Scheme-with-extensions: it's a platform for language creation as well as robust runtime and has many very good tools. It all makes sense if you look at Racket as a fresh language, that only started a few years ago - think about Python in it's infancy. It is very impressive and surprisingly mature in comparison, but it's still very young and has many parts missing - it's almost ready for production, but not quite there yet and I don't think this should be rushed. Sticking with Racket now is a kind of gamble. I think that in a six to eight years time Racket will be competing with Clojure for a place of the most popular Lisp in existence and I think that in the future it will be the "new hot thing" for a while, just as Python or Ruby or JavaScript were. Most importantly Racket is a language that I'd really like to use in ten years. But still, it's uncertain and any number of things can go wrong and Racket can remain unpopular, niche product for eternity. That's the risk of using young, aspiring languages - I once won betting on Python and now I'm going to try again with Racket. So, to summarize this rant: Racket is very young; languages need time to gain traction; if Racket evolves as fast as it does it will become insanely popular when the time comes.

z3phyr 14y ago
I would like to see alternate lisps grow up, like racket, joxa... :)
sigzero 14y ago
Technically, Racket is a Scheme dialect not a LISP one.
- argv_empty 14y ago
  a Scheme dialect not a LISP one I feel a bit confused about the distinction you're making. Didn't Guy Steele refer to Scheme as a LISP dialect?
  - spdegabrielle 14y ago
    All scheme dialects are lisps, but Racket and the various scheme implementations are Lisp-1's, with the same namespace for functions and variables, while Common LISP is a lisp-2, which have separate function and variable namespaces. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1_vs._Lisp-2#The_function_namespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1_vs._Lisp-2#The_function_...
- klibertp 14y ago
  I was using the word "Lisp" to mean "all languages with s-expr based syntax" and not as an abbreviation of Common Lisp. I even explicitly noted that: "Until a few (3?) years ago it was a ... Scheme". But I don't know the Lisp/lisps history that well, did I use the term incorrectly?
- pnathan 14y ago
  Actually... Racket is a Scheme dialect which is a language in the Lisp family. Much like Clojure, Kernel, and newLISP are languages in the Lisp family.
  - klibertp 14y ago
    That's somewhat debatable - I mean whether Racket is a dialect of Scheme. There's a page here: http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html that states that Racket is a descendant of Scheme, but not that it's a dialect. Also here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3358638/280995 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3358638/280995 someone says that Racket is not a Scheme (I think therefore not a dialect of Scheme either) because it's not backwards compatible and doesn't fully implement any of the Scheme standards. On the other hand Racket includes a scheme language; but it's merely one of many possibilities and with default installation comes also algol60 implementation, yet obviously we don't say that Racket is a dialect of Algol. Anyway, I think that day-to-day programming in Racket is sufficiently different from Scheme's that it (Racket) deserves to stand on it's own. Saying it's a descendant of Scheme is obviously ok, but saying it's a dialect of Scheme is a bit too much, I think.

z3phyr 14y ago

I would like to see alternate lisps grow up, like racket, joxa... :)

sigzero 14y ago

Technically, Racket is a Scheme dialect not a LISP one.

argv_empty 14y ago
a Scheme dialect not a LISP one I feel a bit confused about the distinction you're making. Didn't Guy Steele refer to Scheme as a LISP dialect?
- spdegabrielle 14y ago
  All scheme dialects are lisps, but Racket and the various scheme implementations are Lisp-1's, with the same namespace for functions and variables, while Common LISP is a lisp-2, which have separate function and variable namespaces. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1_vs._Lisp-2#The_function_namespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1_vs._Lisp-2#The_function_...
klibertp 14y ago
I was using the word "Lisp" to mean "all languages with s-expr based syntax" and not as an abbreviation of Common Lisp. I even explicitly noted that: "Until a few (3?) years ago it was a ... Scheme". But I don't know the Lisp/lisps history that well, did I use the term incorrectly?
pnathan 14y ago
Actually... Racket is a Scheme dialect which is a language in the Lisp family. Much like Clojure, Kernel, and newLISP are languages in the Lisp family.
- klibertp 14y ago
  That's somewhat debatable - I mean whether Racket is a dialect of Scheme. There's a page here: http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html that states that Racket is a descendant of Scheme, but not that it's a dialect. Also here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3358638/280995 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3358638/280995 someone says that Racket is not a Scheme (I think therefore not a dialect of Scheme either) because it's not backwards compatible and doesn't fully implement any of the Scheme standards. On the other hand Racket includes a scheme language; but it's merely one of many possibilities and with default installation comes also algol60 implementation, yet obviously we don't say that Racket is a dialect of Algol. Anyway, I think that day-to-day programming in Racket is sufficiently different from Scheme's that it (Racket) deserves to stand on it's own. Saying it's a descendant of Scheme is obviously ok, but saying it's a dialect of Scheme is a bit too much, I think.