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I agree with some of the things you said. However, > Yet his problem with Lisp is that "it's big on reference documents" I didn't interpret it that way... Mud

by brianto2010 17y ago

I agree with some of the things you said. However, > Yet his problem with Lisp is that "it's big on reference documents" I didn't interpret it that way... Mudge said: > "Most prominently I think of Lisp when I think of multiple implementations. Maybe it's not so much all the parentheses that have caused Lisp not to become a popular mainstream programming language. Maybe it has more to do with the lack of a single solid implementation. I also noticed that Lisp seems to be big about written language standards, while more popular programming languages more or less follow a reference implementation as the standard for the language." He said that lisp's lack of a single solid implementation is/maybe the cause of its unpopularity. Also, he mentioned 'big on reference documents' as an afterthought (because of the word 'also', I think). The 'reference documents' part is not his main argument. > "If you find 'multiple programming language implementations' annoying, chances are their respective communities find you annoying." Its more like an expression of frustration. I doubt a community would find him annoying unless he actively and incessantly bugs them about his 'annoyances'.

mahmud 17y ago
Lisp is a family of languages, so how can there be a single standard implementation? If he means Common Lisp, well, CL is a standardized programming language; is there a de facto C implementation? how about C++? Of course not! GCC is the most widely available implementation, but you would be foolish to write GCC-dependent C code. SBCL is not harder to install than GCC, in fact, it's trivial to install and upgrade (compared to the nightmare that is a libc upgrade) but you don't see people complaining about C being hard to install or lacking a canonical implementation.
- gdp 17y ago
  But people do write GCC-dependent code. In fact, they will even write GCC version dependent code, to the tune of "this will not compile correctly with GCC 4.x.x, you will need to use 2.95.26.2.3.5.1" And given that the complaint was specifically levelled against Ruby, for the most part, it seems to be making one specific point: If your language is specified by the existence of a single reference implementation, and you keep changing that reference implementation, then that's equivalent to the language continually changing, which is a fair criticism, I think, particularly when it breaks backwards compatibility or continually deprecates features used in production code (requiring an endless cycle of rewrites, or maintenance of some older branch of the implementation). This sort of behaviour would certainly strike me as "annoying", but that's essentially what you get when you commit yourself to using a product which makes no attempts to standardise, and which lacks large commercial customers who would place pressure on the software vendor to keep backwards-compatibility as a priority.

mahmud 17y ago

Lisp is a family of languages, so how can there be a single standard implementation? If he means Common Lisp, well, CL is a standardized programming language; is there a de facto C implementation? how about C++? Of course not! GCC is the most widely available implementation, but you would be foolish to write GCC-dependent C code. SBCL is not harder to install than GCC, in fact, it's trivial to install and upgrade (compared to the nightmare that is a libc upgrade) but you don't see people complaining about C being hard to install or lacking a canonical implementation.

gdp 17y ago
But people do write GCC-dependent code. In fact, they will even write GCC version dependent code, to the tune of "this will not compile correctly with GCC 4.x.x, you will need to use 2.95.26.2.3.5.1" And given that the complaint was specifically levelled against Ruby, for the most part, it seems to be making one specific point: If your language is specified by the existence of a single reference implementation, and you keep changing that reference implementation, then that's equivalent to the language continually changing, which is a fair criticism, I think, particularly when it breaks backwards compatibility or continually deprecates features used in production code (requiring an endless cycle of rewrites, or maintenance of some older branch of the implementation). This sort of behaviour would certainly strike me as "annoying", but that's essentially what you get when you commit yourself to using a product which makes no attempts to standardise, and which lacks large commercial customers who would place pressure on the software vendor to keep backwards-compatibility as a priority.