4 ms·

> Will a homoiconic language ever capture the mainstream? Not the author (obviously) but I think it already has -- Clojure has gone mainstream.

• briantrice 12y ago
  Clojure deserves a lot of respect for attacking concurrency in a totally new way, but I would not call it mainstream. Homoiconicity is overrated; Atomo and Atomy represented better where I wanted to go, which is to adapt notation to the problem, even have it be flexibly remapped and recombined per modular scope.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• _delirium 12y ago
  I'm not sure Clojure has even matched the "Lisp high-water mark" of '80s Common Lisp, which I'd consider only quasi-mainstream. Though it is definitely more vibrant in 2014 than the others.
  • lispm 12y ago
    That's difficult. Symbolics alone had a billion dollar revenue in the 80s (sum of the years), with a maximum of 1000 employees. Then there were TI, Xerox, Franz, Lucid, LispWorks, Intellicorp, ... as companies. I'd guess that Lisp earned in direct sales around 2-3 billion dollars in the 80s... In a much smaller market. Inflation adjusted that would be 4-6 billion dollar today. A large Lisp company today might employ 20-40 people. Large user groups in companies might have less than hundred employees (like ITA/Google had (has?) a few years ago).
    • mej10 12y ago
      Wow, I never realized Symbolics was that big. Were they just not able to keep up in the era of cheap, commodity hardware for workstations?
      • hga 12y ago
        A lot of that, a lot of NIH, and a lot of bad behavior and very bad management.