9 ms·

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was al

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot). However, I don't think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed. So, what's the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn't have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later. Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn't "get it" - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple. Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all. tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? Everything I've read makes absolutely no sense why it isn't. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves. </rant>

dca 17y ago
My opinion - a lot of it comes down to implementation. There are a couple of really good open source implementations, but for the most part a lot of Lisp folks prefer the commercial ones. Anecdotally, Lisp came along so long ago that it has survived several different phases of computer software sales evolution. The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty. So while I use the heck out of SBCL, I must admit that I find myself occasionally envious of the libraries and attention, and especially smoothness of integration with new technology (as opposed to new paradigms) that other dynamic languages such as python and ruby seem to enjoy.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty." This assumes lisp = Common Lisp. Clojure for example is entirely Open Source and a delight to code in.
  - dca 17y ago
    Good point. Bad assumption on my part.
    - lispm 17y ago
      Clojure is not 'warty'? Can it even dump an image?
- Keyframe 17y ago
  > commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro I understand that Clozure CL and SBCL are also good. Maybe not THAT good, but good. Thing that bothers me with that argument is if CL or Lisp in general had the appeal to the critical mass of programmers, it would be built - no matter if standards were the obstacle or commercial implementations. They would come and build a new one, no? As for the libraries - there surely is a way to make bindings to other libraries. For example, we have that kind of problem in D, but we can easily bind to C libraries, so that is not that much of a hassle. My deep thought on all of that is what bothers me the most. Here is my theory. Is it possible that the real reason is that there are basically two types of programmers: 1. Recipe / Cargo Cult programmers that are programmers by career inertia 2. Programmers that think more about the nature of the problem and hack their mindset to the code. You know, the type that thinks more than they code - code is just a splurt at the end of the process. If that is true, and if Lisp appeals only to the second bunch (not all of them, of course). It might be a hypothetical disastrous indicator of the ratio in programmer population. Or maybe I'm just thinking too much about it all.
pg 17y ago
It's not that dead. You used it to make this comment.
- Keyframe 17y ago
  Touche and haw haw, but you very well know what I've meant.
  - pg 17y ago
    No, actually, I'm not sure which of two usual misconceptions you have: (a) that Lisp = Common Lisp, or (b) that Lisp is rarely used. Usually when people think Lisp is dead, they mean (b), but you've been here long enough to have noticed the volume of stories about Clojure on HN, so the probability of (a) and (b) seem about equal.
    - Shprrrrt 17y ago
      Clojure crossed Common Lisp on Google Trends in october 2008, then remained stable until 1.0. From then, it kept on growing, at a slow but steady pace. I guess we'll see another boom when the major libraries will have stabilized as well... http://www.google.com/trends?q=clojure,common+lisp http://www.google.com/trends?q=clojure,common+lisp
      - cema 17y ago
        The trend for Clojure is encouraging, however when comparing it with the trend for Common Lisp, one has to keep in mind that the latter is often called simply Lisp. A slight decline in the trend for Common Lisp may be related to an increase in such usage (if there is one, which I am not sure about).
    - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
      Not to mention the fact that even non-lisps are getting progressively more lispy over time.
      - 17y ago
eugenejen 17y ago
I am not an Lisp user at the moment, but I worked on a project before with NAG IRIS Explorer, which is a scientific data visualization tool. The scripting language in the system is scheme based around 1993. (I think it is a dialect of scheme that is closed to GNU Guile). I think scheme/lisp is used inside a lot of big systems, such as AutoCAD, Emacs, IRIS Explorer and probably more. One of computer graphic pioneers Ken Perlin wrote a shading language for his own renderer in scheme. But unless you use his renderer, you will never know he put a scheme interpreter inside to process his shading language.
mahmud 17y ago
Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? You will need to bite bullets, take responsibilities and own projects and budgets if you want to use lisp at "work". I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. It wasn't always like that; I started as project manager for a tiny but growing PHP codebase. The application domain is both too broad, and also error prone; a large web application platform. There are both budget and time constraints and corporate buyers are on our ass daily. Between conference calls and discussions with the outsourcing company that was doing our project, I decided to prototype it on the side in CL and see how far I can go. Honestly, I prototyped it just to see if I understood the application domain. The programmers where coming to me on an hourly basis asking questions and it came down to the level where I had to spoon-feed them fully specified PHP classes, well documented API designs and database models. These guys were just typing out my sweat and getting paid for it. I bit the bullet, took full responsibility, looked my boss in the eye and and said it was now MY project.
- chollida1 17y ago
  > I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. Right on. What Common Lisp Operating System did you find suitable for what you are doing?
  - mahmud 17y ago
    That's a question you should ask every non-C programmer. But yeah, I run Movitz. http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ Chew it. [Edit: this, of course, is a wise-ass reply to something I considered a wise-ass question. I develop on Win32 and deploy on Linux]
    - chollida1 17y ago
      Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS. What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS? What is "Chew it"?
shiro 17y ago
> My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 Ah, you've come a bit too late. Late 80s through early 90s Lisp machines were popular in the CG industry; modeling, animating and even rendering software were written in pure Lisp. After Lisp machines were taken over by unix workstations, those tools were ported on Common Lisp and as far as I know they kept some share until late 90s, used in quite a few popular titles on consoles such as PlayStation or Nintendo64. Why have they gone? I think the reason is compound of many factors, and I've only seen the transition from just one corner of the industry; other people have different opinion. One thing I suspect is that Lisp camp didn't have enough resource to catch up the steep increase of demanded quality and quantity as graphics hardware quickly evolved. Back in mid-90s I used 2k to 5k-poly model, made in the modeler written in Lisp, to make some demo game that run on big SGI machines; such poly count became norm in late stage of PlayStation, and when PlayStation 2 appeared the poly count increased order of magnitude, the trend which still keeps going. The architecture of the Lisp modeling tool back then wasn't suitable for the "next generation" graphics; it needed to be rewritten, but they had hard time to do so. Meantime, bigger players entered into the industry, using legion of developers to pump out authoring tools and middleware. I believe Lisp can boost productivity, but it tend to work better in a small team tackling one hard problem. When tons of features and optimizations done by lots of developers are required, I guess the power of language probably matters relatively less, and the amount of circulating money matters more. (Naughtydog was probably an exception. The founder was Lisp guy, incredibly good one.) I suspect that it may be a general trend. When a problem is very hard and only small group of enthusiasts are working on it, they choose tools that are most effective for themselves. Like explorers who go into the wild where nobody ever traveled. Lisp may shine in such circumstances. Once the wilderness is roughly mapped, small towns are built, and dirt roads are created, then much broader development is required. Lots of developers come to the front and start expanding the envelope. Once the field enters in that stage, the choice of language reflects the proportion of their share in general; many use C/C++, for example, and Lisp becomes minority. (I don't intend to despise the developers in that stage; there are still hard problems and they are still doing incredibly cool things. It's just that the earliest stage, where even what's hard is not really clear and only extremely ambitious people are active, may have different demographics in terms of the choice of the language. I guess Viaweb was also one of such cases.)
derefr 17y ago
I'm not a pro Lisper, but I think reasons offered for this include: * The AI winter (with Lisp, at the time, being seen as "the AI language") * The heavy-cost and closed nature of the toolchain, and lack of standardization between toolchains, when industry was searching for a language to rally behind several decades ago * The continued lack of standardization on all the "included batteries" when the open source movement was looking for languages to adopt for scripting a decade ago * The deep semantic rabbit-hole a Lisp codebase can turn into when any macro-like functionality is used, meaning that a programmer has to basically learn every project as its own language (that is, DSL) before they can get to work—further meaning that projects grow a sense of individual stewardship/artistic direction, and become harder to work on by hiring committees and one-off contractors * The continued outside impression of Lisps as slow, pure-functional and academic (even though most today are none of those) * The unwillingness for most Lisps to embrace the Unix philosophy (meaning that it's easier to write a web browser in e-lisp than to loosely couple to one already written in some other language. Clojure is basically the only Lisp that escapes this, cleanly interoperating with the APIs of other languages... on the JVM, which itself throws Unix design principles out the window.) I'm sure there are more well-founded answers, but all of those came to mind on my road to accepting Lisp.
- Keyframe 17y ago
  Strong arguments there, I cannot even question them. Probably the two that stand out are DSLs and impression of Lisp as slow, academic in nature. I'll go read up on AI winter again, shame I wasn't around to witness that era. On a related note, I just got an email a few days ago for "Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-10 (in Lugano, Switzerland, March 5-8 2010)".
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Your point about "embrac[ing] the Unix philosophy" is a good one. Probably not the biggest factor for mainstream adoption, but significant nonetheless. While there are some Lisps now that that do this well (particularly those that compile to C, such as Chicken Scheme), it has a big historical precedent. I've been wondering how Lisp would look if it were redesigned from the ground up to include Unix's philosophy, and I'm beginning to think that Erlang would be a good candidate. (With a healthy dose of Prolog as well.)
PieSquared 17y ago
There is nothing really 'dead' about Lisp, whether you're speaking about Common Lisp or all Lisps. But it is true that most programmers would not turn to it when considering new projects. I essentially see two problems with the state of Lisps. First off, the one with major library support, Common Lisp, is often times lacking in good library support. You'll find 10 libraries to do anything, but 5 of them will be undocumented, 3 of them will be dead projects, and 2 of them are incomplete. The second problem is community. Again, I speak of Common Lisp, because it's the most fully-featured Lisp out there right now. Where is the community of Common Lisp? Who do I go to ask for feature requests in the 'next version'? Do I get some form of support? (I mean, c'mon, just compare it to Python!) I think that Clojure has solved the second problem, more or less, with it's BDFL. However, I don't think it has the breadth of features that CL has, and being on the JVM brings some of its own problems. Clojure is getting there, but I think that if a group of, say, 10 people decided to 'popularize' Common Lisp, they could. Just create a distribution of Lisp (say, using sbcl or anything else cross-platform) and ship it with a few helper libraries - since Lisp has macros and reader macros, it can essentially be transformed into the clean language it sometimes isn't.
- aerique 17y ago
  So how's CL different for getting support than Python?
  - greml1n 17y ago
    When I google for a bug/question in Python, I invariably find remarks about the same Python I am using (CPython, the effective standard and single implementation that works on all platforms equally well which all users have rallied around). When I google about the same for whichever of the multitude of Common Lisp implementations exist out there, I have to filter down to which one as well as which platform. That is a tremendous difference, especially for newcomers. As for "actual" support, given the focus on a single implementation (which I understand and like that it is not possible with CL), when you need to hire some random consultant service, you don't have to do the same thing when filtering prospective people.
silentbicycle 17y ago
You may want to consider using Lua for game scripting. It's a lot more strongly influenced by Scheme than e.g. Python, and has been designed from day one to be embedded as a scripting language for existing C/C++ projects. It's quite mature, widely used in the game industry, and has been in production use for over fifteen years.
jodrellblank 17y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ It's easy to get people to line up by ASP.Net. That's the Microsoft way like it or lump it. It's easy to get people to line up by PHP. That's the popular choice. It's easy to get people to line up by Jave. That's the non-Microsoft business option. It's the popular business choice. It's not easy to get people who are dissatisfied with someone elses standards and who are all individully looking for the best option of features they like and want and minimal amounts of the things they dislike, and who are raised in a society of quiet agreement and noisy disagreement, to line up by any particular standard.

dca 17y ago

My opinion - a lot of it comes down to implementation. There are a couple of really good open source implementations, but for the most part a lot of Lisp folks prefer the commercial ones. Anecdotally, Lisp came along so long ago that it has survived several different phases of computer software sales evolution. The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty. So while I use the heck out of SBCL, I must admit that I find myself occasionally envious of the libraries and attention, and especially smoothness of integration with new technology (as opposed to new paradigms) that other dynamic languages such as python and ruby seem to enjoy.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty." This assumes lisp = Common Lisp. Clojure for example is entirely Open Source and a delight to code in.
- dca 17y ago
  Good point. Bad assumption on my part.
  - lispm 17y ago
    Clojure is not 'warty'? Can it even dump an image?
Keyframe 17y ago
> commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro I understand that Clozure CL and SBCL are also good. Maybe not THAT good, but good. Thing that bothers me with that argument is if CL or Lisp in general had the appeal to the critical mass of programmers, it would be built - no matter if standards were the obstacle or commercial implementations. They would come and build a new one, no? As for the libraries - there surely is a way to make bindings to other libraries. For example, we have that kind of problem in D, but we can easily bind to C libraries, so that is not that much of a hassle. My deep thought on all of that is what bothers me the most. Here is my theory. Is it possible that the real reason is that there are basically two types of programmers: 1. Recipe / Cargo Cult programmers that are programmers by career inertia 2. Programmers that think more about the nature of the problem and hack their mindset to the code. You know, the type that thinks more than they code - code is just a splurt at the end of the process. If that is true, and if Lisp appeals only to the second bunch (not all of them, of course). It might be a hypothetical disastrous indicator of the ratio in programmer population. Or maybe I'm just thinking too much about it all.

pg 17y ago

It's not that dead. You used it to make this comment.

Keyframe 17y ago
Touche and haw haw, but you very well know what I've meant.
- pg 17y ago
  No, actually, I'm not sure which of two usual misconceptions you have: (a) that Lisp = Common Lisp, or (b) that Lisp is rarely used. Usually when people think Lisp is dead, they mean (b), but you've been here long enough to have noticed the volume of stories about Clojure on HN, so the probability of (a) and (b) seem about equal.
  - Shprrrrt 17y ago
    Clojure crossed Common Lisp on Google Trends in october 2008, then remained stable until 1.0. From then, it kept on growing, at a slow but steady pace. I guess we'll see another boom when the major libraries will have stabilized as well... http://www.google.com/trends?q=clojure,common+lisp http://www.google.com/trends?q=clojure,common+lisp
    - cema 17y ago
      The trend for Clojure is encouraging, however when comparing it with the trend for Common Lisp, one has to keep in mind that the latter is often called simply Lisp. A slight decline in the trend for Common Lisp may be related to an increase in such usage (if there is one, which I am not sure about).
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    Not to mention the fact that even non-lisps are getting progressively more lispy over time.
    - 17y ago

eugenejen 17y ago

I am not an Lisp user at the moment, but I worked on a project before with NAG IRIS Explorer, which is a scientific data visualization tool. The scripting language in the system is scheme based around 1993. (I think it is a dialect of scheme that is closed to GNU Guile). I think scheme/lisp is used inside a lot of big systems, such as AutoCAD, Emacs, IRIS Explorer and probably more. One of computer graphic pioneers Ken Perlin wrote a shading language for his own renderer in scheme. But unless you use his renderer, you will never know he put a scheme interpreter inside to process his shading language.

mahmud 17y ago

Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? You will need to bite bullets, take responsibilities and own projects and budgets if you want to use lisp at "work". I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. It wasn't always like that; I started as project manager for a tiny but growing PHP codebase. The application domain is both too broad, and also error prone; a large web application platform. There are both budget and time constraints and corporate buyers are on our ass daily. Between conference calls and discussions with the outsourcing company that was doing our project, I decided to prototype it on the side in CL and see how far I can go. Honestly, I prototyped it just to see if I understood the application domain. The programmers where coming to me on an hourly basis asking questions and it came down to the level where I had to spoon-feed them fully specified PHP classes, well documented API designs and database models. These guys were just typing out my sweat and getting paid for it. I bit the bullet, took full responsibility, looked my boss in the eye and and said it was now MY project.

chollida1 17y ago
> I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. Right on. What Common Lisp Operating System did you find suitable for what you are doing?
- mahmud 17y ago
  That's a question you should ask every non-C programmer. But yeah, I run Movitz. http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ Chew it. [Edit: this, of course, is a wise-ass reply to something I considered a wise-ass question. I develop on Win32 and deploy on Linux]
  - chollida1 17y ago
    Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS. What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS? What is "Chew it"?

shiro 17y ago

> My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 Ah, you've come a bit too late. Late 80s through early 90s Lisp machines were popular in the CG industry; modeling, animating and even rendering software were written in pure Lisp. After Lisp machines were taken over by unix workstations, those tools were ported on Common Lisp and as far as I know they kept some share until late 90s, used in quite a few popular titles on consoles such as PlayStation or Nintendo64. Why have they gone? I think the reason is compound of many factors, and I've only seen the transition from just one corner of the industry; other people have different opinion. One thing I suspect is that Lisp camp didn't have enough resource to catch up the steep increase of demanded quality and quantity as graphics hardware quickly evolved. Back in mid-90s I used 2k to 5k-poly model, made in the modeler written in Lisp, to make some demo game that run on big SGI machines; such poly count became norm in late stage of PlayStation, and when PlayStation 2 appeared the poly count increased order of magnitude, the trend which still keeps going. The architecture of the Lisp modeling tool back then wasn't suitable for the "next generation" graphics; it needed to be rewritten, but they had hard time to do so. Meantime, bigger players entered into the industry, using legion of developers to pump out authoring tools and middleware. I believe Lisp can boost productivity, but it tend to work better in a small team tackling one hard problem. When tons of features and optimizations done by lots of developers are required, I guess the power of language probably matters relatively less, and the amount of circulating money matters more. (Naughtydog was probably an exception. The founder was Lisp guy, incredibly good one.) I suspect that it may be a general trend. When a problem is very hard and only small group of enthusiasts are working on it, they choose tools that are most effective for themselves. Like explorers who go into the wild where nobody ever traveled. Lisp may shine in such circumstances. Once the wilderness is roughly mapped, small towns are built, and dirt roads are created, then much broader development is required. Lots of developers come to the front and start expanding the envelope. Once the field enters in that stage, the choice of language reflects the proportion of their share in general; many use C/C++, for example, and Lisp becomes minority. (I don't intend to despise the developers in that stage; there are still hard problems and they are still doing incredibly cool things. It's just that the earliest stage, where even what's hard is not really clear and only extremely ambitious people are active, may have different demographics in terms of the choice of the language. I guess Viaweb was also one of such cases.)

derefr 17y ago

I'm not a pro Lisper, but I think reasons offered for this include: * The AI winter (with Lisp, at the time, being seen as "the AI language") * The heavy-cost and closed nature of the toolchain, and lack of standardization between toolchains, when industry was searching for a language to rally behind several decades ago * The continued lack of standardization on all the "included batteries" when the open source movement was looking for languages to adopt for scripting a decade ago * The deep semantic rabbit-hole a Lisp codebase can turn into when any macro-like functionality is used, meaning that a programmer has to basically learn every project as its own language (that is, DSL) before they can get to work—further meaning that projects grow a sense of individual stewardship/artistic direction, and become harder to work on by hiring committees and one-off contractors * The continued outside impression of Lisps as slow, pure-functional and academic (even though most today are none of those) * The unwillingness for most Lisps to embrace the Unix philosophy (meaning that it's easier to write a web browser in e-lisp than to loosely couple to one already written in some other language. Clojure is basically the only Lisp that escapes this, cleanly interoperating with the APIs of other languages... on the JVM, which itself throws Unix design principles out the window.) I'm sure there are more well-founded answers, but all of those came to mind on my road to accepting Lisp.

Keyframe 17y ago
Strong arguments there, I cannot even question them. Probably the two that stand out are DSLs and impression of Lisp as slow, academic in nature. I'll go read up on AI winter again, shame I wasn't around to witness that era. On a related note, I just got an email a few days ago for "Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-10 (in Lugano, Switzerland, March 5-8 2010)".
silentbicycle 17y ago
Your point about "embrac[ing] the Unix philosophy" is a good one. Probably not the biggest factor for mainstream adoption, but significant nonetheless. While there are some Lisps now that that do this well (particularly those that compile to C, such as Chicken Scheme), it has a big historical precedent. I've been wondering how Lisp would look if it were redesigned from the ground up to include Unix's philosophy, and I'm beginning to think that Erlang would be a good candidate. (With a healthy dose of Prolog as well.)

PieSquared 17y ago

There is nothing really 'dead' about Lisp, whether you're speaking about Common Lisp or all Lisps. But it is true that most programmers would not turn to it when considering new projects. I essentially see two problems with the state of Lisps. First off, the one with major library support, Common Lisp, is often times lacking in good library support. You'll find 10 libraries to do anything, but 5 of them will be undocumented, 3 of them will be dead projects, and 2 of them are incomplete. The second problem is community. Again, I speak of Common Lisp, because it's the most fully-featured Lisp out there right now. Where is the community of Common Lisp? Who do I go to ask for feature requests in the 'next version'? Do I get some form of support? (I mean, c'mon, just compare it to Python!) I think that Clojure has solved the second problem, more or less, with it's BDFL. However, I don't think it has the breadth of features that CL has, and being on the JVM brings some of its own problems. Clojure is getting there, but I think that if a group of, say, 10 people decided to 'popularize' Common Lisp, they could. Just create a distribution of Lisp (say, using sbcl or anything else cross-platform) and ship it with a few helper libraries - since Lisp has macros and reader macros, it can essentially be transformed into the clean language it sometimes isn't.

aerique 17y ago
So how's CL different for getting support than Python?
- greml1n 17y ago
  When I google for a bug/question in Python, I invariably find remarks about the same Python I am using (CPython, the effective standard and single implementation that works on all platforms equally well which all users have rallied around). When I google about the same for whichever of the multitude of Common Lisp implementations exist out there, I have to filter down to which one as well as which platform. That is a tremendous difference, especially for newcomers. As for "actual" support, given the focus on a single implementation (which I understand and like that it is not possible with CL), when you need to hire some random consultant service, you don't have to do the same thing when filtering prospective people.

silentbicycle 17y ago

You may want to consider using Lua for game scripting. It's a lot more strongly influenced by Scheme than e.g. Python, and has been designed from day one to be embedded as a scripting language for existing C/C++ projects. It's quite mature, widely used in the game industry, and has been in production use for over fifteen years.

jodrellblank 17y ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ It's easy to get people to line up by ASP.Net. That's the Microsoft way like it or lump it. It's easy to get people to line up by PHP. That's the popular choice. It's easy to get people to line up by Jave. That's the non-Microsoft business option. It's the popular business choice. It's not easy to get people who are dissatisfied with someone elses standards and who are all individully looking for the best option of features they like and want and minimal amounts of the things they dislike, and who are raised in a society of quiet agreement and noisy disagreement, to line up by any particular standard.