5 ms·

- Lisp has not succeeded on a relative scale. Let's not discount that. Is there a clear reason for this? I've only ever heard good things about lisp. My impre

by japhyr 11y ago

- Lisp has not succeeded on a relative scale. Let's not discount that. Is there a clear reason for this? I've only ever heard good things about lisp. My impression, as a hobbyist programmer, is that lisp appeals to people who have a deep intellectual curiosity about the way programs work. It doesn't seem to appeal to the larger pool of programmers who are looking for a language thy can pick up in a straightforward way so thy can either get a job, or build a project they've been thinking of.

nkassis 11y ago
My naive reasoning of why is that a lot of people start by learning c-like languages and don't see the need to learn something as different as lisp. As lisp and it's descendants were never really the dominant language, it was never the first type of language most people learned. Now that many mainstream languages have progress to incorporate more and more lisp features, it's becoming less foreign to many devs and the popularity is increasing and is now higher than I think it ever was.
jeswin 11y ago
In a way it's similar to frameworks. Frameworks which are more popular try to make choices for the user (like Rails). As an end-user I clearly wanna focus on my tasks, rather than choosing a toolset or perhaps building one myself. Lisp is minimal and abstract. That's appealing to a different set of people, who aren't satisfied with off-the-shelf abstraction levels. It's also fun and challenging to work at that level, though IMO it's not always going to translate to better productivity. For me, learning assembly and going through the 80386 reference manuals were more rewarding in terms of understanding how programs work. Sorry I have no specific insight to offer on the question you asked.
jarcane 11y ago
I fell in love with Lisps and FP precisely because they were an easier, more straightforward way of just getting the job done than the alternative. How many times have you written a dozen lines of for-loop that could've been one map/reduce? How many times have you written a whole page of Object { this.foo = ... } just to add the simplest of new features? Literally the reason I got out of programming after high school almost 15 years ago and wrote it off as 'not for me' was that kind of tedium, and learning Lisp and FP were the point in my return when I said 'Oh, wait, actually this is pretty great; where the hell was this when I was a kid?' Lisp didn't take off because 1) home-computer-ready implementations were largely out of reach for three decades, and 2) Lisp and FP both were embracing the importance of expressive power during an era in which most programming still worshiped doing things the hardest way possible. Shit, when I was a kid, you weren't a 'real programmer' unless you did everything in assembly. Then it was C above all, to be followed by EnterpriseFactoryJavaFactoryFactories. By the standards of most of the programming world, where there are still real bosses who grade coder performance in KLOC, Lisp is 'wrong'. But pumping out thousands of lines of repetitive boilerplate is not equal to efficiency, it just looks like it to a work culture that only understands output of work rather than quality of work. If programmer A takes 1 hour to solve the problem with 100 LOC, and programmer B thinks for 45 minutes and then solves the same problem with 4, who's the most efficient in that scenario? And more to the point, which of those two work environments do you want to sign on for?
- pjmlp 11y ago
  The closest I got to Xerox Parc environments was Smalltalk VisualWorks and Oberon (Wirth made it based on his Cedar experience). Then thanks to my curiosity I delved into the Xerox's and Genera documentation. It is sad that a PDP-11 and VMS descendedant won the mainstream. How much better could computing be if those behind those systems hadn't failed to bring them to the masses. However environments like the JVM, .NET and their tooling bring us somehow close to it. Also Swift with its Playground is helping new generations to rediscover this experience. So maybe not all is lost.
- rudolf0 11y ago
  I take it you're probably not a huge fan of Golang? :)
  - oberstein 11y ago
    I would imagine not, though the parent can speak for himself. I agree with what has been said before, that Go is a bold step backwards, just another language to replace large amounts of Legacy Enterprise Code with (sometimes) slightly less large amounts of (Soon To Be Legacy) Enterprise Code. Go has going for it corporate backing and a good community, but on the technical merits alone, there is a better language for every task.
  - jarcane 11y ago
    I wish I was. That little gopher is adorable. Rust, on the other hand, gives me palpitations.
  - titanomachy 11y ago
    Is golang very verbose?
    - rudolf0 11y ago
      I don't know about "very", but it's pretty verbose and very imperative. You have to do a lot of repetition, often straight up code copy+pasting, in some cases.
- 11y ago
teddyh 11y ago
It’s the Lisp Curse: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html “Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.”
jimbokun 11y ago
Lisp was the hot new thing in the mid-to-late 80s, when the AI Winter hit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter When AI couldn't live up to the hype, funding dried up. A lot of that funding was driving the companies and research projects that were doing major Lisp development. After the AI Winter, Lisp was strongly associated with the unmet promises of AI and thus gained a reputation as a poor choice for serious projects. It's never really recovered.
- lispm 11y ago
  Around 2000 a new generation rediscovered Lisp. SBCL was released in dec 1999. CMUCL rethought with a simplified implementation and build process. From then on various implementations were improved. Clozure CL was released on multiple platforms. The commercial Lisps were moving to the then important operating systems and architectures. The hype moved to Clojure, Racket, Julia and other Lisp-like languages. The core Lisp may not have the same depth of commercial activity as in the 80s, but generally the implementations are in the best shape since two decades. There are still lots of open issues, but from the Lisp programmer standpoint, it's an incredible time.
badpenny 11y ago
lisp makes you an asshole programmer. you're encouraged and enabled to write your own language for each problem, thus isolating you in a world of your own views and ideas. it's a babelian tar pit, luring programmers to their doom. being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers. it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors. anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic. eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp asshole stage. this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp. it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts. lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3481275&pagenumber=161&perpage=40#post407427543 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > a complete ignorance of social factors. Maybe that's why I like Lisp so much. Because "social factors" are so frikkin' annoying and irrelevant and I feel the world would be so much better for everyone if we stopped paying so much attention to them as we do now.
  - CamTin 11y ago
    To formulate this a little more nicely, I might say instead that there is a real need for "intimate" languages, just as there is a need for "collaborative" languages. As an example, the shells on my personal machines are often customized beyond the comprehension of anyone who isn't me, with tons of two-letter aliases and bash functions, cryptic environment variables, and a $PATH that's several terminal lines long, filled with labrythine symlinks and oneliners that I've accumulated over the years. Many people have similarly elaborate and impenetrable emacs configurations. That's fine, since this is my personal environment, but at work (I'm a sysadmin, more or less) I'm still able to use more-or-less bash, and even write portable shell scripts that eschew bash-isms. Similarly, all that horrible e-lisp powering super-personalized workflows doesn't prevent someone from writing an emacs mode that they can share with others, the point being that a language that enables customization is great, because you can always just not do that and write code that others will find comprehensible. Conversely, if your language forces you to write in a collaborative style, you can't gain efficiencies in your private use of it.
stray 11y ago
>> Lisp has not succeeded on a relative scale. Let's not discount that. > Is there a clear reason for this? Yes. In the 1980s AI was teh new shiny and at that time, Lisp was almost synonymous with AI. A bunch of people over-promised when it came to AI and expert systems, and failed to deliver. And people conflated the failure of the promise of AI with the failure of Lisp. Essentially, guilt by association -- people can be dumb that way. Amusingly, once something in the realm of AI actually works -- we stop calling it AI. But one thing is for certain: the scruffies have been right more often than the neats. Still, Common Lisp is pretty effin' awesome.

by japhyr 11y ago

nkassis 11y ago

My naive reasoning of why is that a lot of people start by learning c-like languages and don't see the need to learn something as different as lisp. As lisp and it's descendants were never really the dominant language, it was never the first type of language most people learned. Now that many mainstream languages have progress to incorporate more and more lisp features, it's becoming less foreign to many devs and the popularity is increasing and is now higher than I think it ever was.

jeswin 11y ago

In a way it's similar to frameworks. Frameworks which are more popular try to make choices for the user (like Rails). As an end-user I clearly wanna focus on my tasks, rather than choosing a toolset or perhaps building one myself. Lisp is minimal and abstract. That's appealing to a different set of people, who aren't satisfied with off-the-shelf abstraction levels. It's also fun and challenging to work at that level, though IMO it's not always going to translate to better productivity. For me, learning assembly and going through the 80386 reference manuals were more rewarding in terms of understanding how programs work. Sorry I have no specific insight to offer on the question you asked.

jarcane 11y ago

I fell in love with Lisps and FP precisely because they were an easier, more straightforward way of just getting the job done than the alternative. How many times have you written a dozen lines of for-loop that could've been one map/reduce? How many times have you written a whole page of Object { this.foo = ... } just to add the simplest of new features? Literally the reason I got out of programming after high school almost 15 years ago and wrote it off as 'not for me' was that kind of tedium, and learning Lisp and FP were the point in my return when I said 'Oh, wait, actually this is pretty great; where the hell was this when I was a kid?' Lisp didn't take off because 1) home-computer-ready implementations were largely out of reach for three decades, and 2) Lisp and FP both were embracing the importance of expressive power during an era in which most programming still worshiped doing things the hardest way possible. Shit, when I was a kid, you weren't a 'real programmer' unless you did everything in assembly. Then it was C above all, to be followed by EnterpriseFactoryJavaFactoryFactories. By the standards of most of the programming world, where there are still real bosses who grade coder performance in KLOC, Lisp is 'wrong'. But pumping out thousands of lines of repetitive boilerplate is not equal to efficiency, it just looks like it to a work culture that only understands output of work rather than quality of work. If programmer A takes 1 hour to solve the problem with 100 LOC, and programmer B thinks for 45 minutes and then solves the same problem with 4, who's the most efficient in that scenario? And more to the point, which of those two work environments do you want to sign on for?

pjmlp 11y ago
The closest I got to Xerox Parc environments was Smalltalk VisualWorks and Oberon (Wirth made it based on his Cedar experience). Then thanks to my curiosity I delved into the Xerox's and Genera documentation. It is sad that a PDP-11 and VMS descendedant won the mainstream. How much better could computing be if those behind those systems hadn't failed to bring them to the masses. However environments like the JVM, .NET and their tooling bring us somehow close to it. Also Swift with its Playground is helping new generations to rediscover this experience. So maybe not all is lost.
rudolf0 11y ago
I take it you're probably not a huge fan of Golang? :)
- oberstein 11y ago
  I would imagine not, though the parent can speak for himself. I agree with what has been said before, that Go is a bold step backwards, just another language to replace large amounts of Legacy Enterprise Code with (sometimes) slightly less large amounts of (Soon To Be Legacy) Enterprise Code. Go has going for it corporate backing and a good community, but on the technical merits alone, there is a better language for every task.
- jarcane 11y ago
  I wish I was. That little gopher is adorable. Rust, on the other hand, gives me palpitations.
- titanomachy 11y ago
  Is golang very verbose?
  - rudolf0 11y ago
    I don't know about "very", but it's pretty verbose and very imperative. You have to do a lot of repetition, often straight up code copy+pasting, in some cases.
11y ago

teddyh 11y ago

It’s the Lisp Curse: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html “Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.”

jimbokun 11y ago

Lisp was the hot new thing in the mid-to-late 80s, when the AI Winter hit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter When AI couldn't live up to the hype, funding dried up. A lot of that funding was driving the companies and research projects that were doing major Lisp development. After the AI Winter, Lisp was strongly associated with the unmet promises of AI and thus gained a reputation as a poor choice for serious projects. It's never really recovered.

lispm 11y ago
Around 2000 a new generation rediscovered Lisp. SBCL was released in dec 1999. CMUCL rethought with a simplified implementation and build process. From then on various implementations were improved. Clozure CL was released on multiple platforms. The commercial Lisps were moving to the then important operating systems and architectures. The hype moved to Clojure, Racket, Julia and other Lisp-like languages. The core Lisp may not have the same depth of commercial activity as in the 80s, but generally the implementations are in the best shape since two decades. There are still lots of open issues, but from the Lisp programmer standpoint, it's an incredible time.

badpenny 11y ago

lisp makes you an asshole programmer. you're encouraged and enabled to write your own language for each problem, thus isolating you in a world of your own views and ideas. it's a babelian tar pit, luring programmers to their doom. being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers. it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors. anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic. eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp asshole stage. this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp. it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts. lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3481275&pagenumber=161&perpage=40#post407427543 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> a complete ignorance of social factors. Maybe that's why I like Lisp so much. Because "social factors" are so frikkin' annoying and irrelevant and I feel the world would be so much better for everyone if we stopped paying so much attention to them as we do now.
- CamTin 11y ago
  To formulate this a little more nicely, I might say instead that there is a real need for "intimate" languages, just as there is a need for "collaborative" languages. As an example, the shells on my personal machines are often customized beyond the comprehension of anyone who isn't me, with tons of two-letter aliases and bash functions, cryptic environment variables, and a $PATH that's several terminal lines long, filled with labrythine symlinks and oneliners that I've accumulated over the years. Many people have similarly elaborate and impenetrable emacs configurations. That's fine, since this is my personal environment, but at work (I'm a sysadmin, more or less) I'm still able to use more-or-less bash, and even write portable shell scripts that eschew bash-isms. Similarly, all that horrible e-lisp powering super-personalized workflows doesn't prevent someone from writing an emacs mode that they can share with others, the point being that a language that enables customization is great, because you can always just not do that and write code that others will find comprehensible. Conversely, if your language forces you to write in a collaborative style, you can't gain efficiencies in your private use of it.

stray 11y ago

>> Lisp has not succeeded on a relative scale. Let's not discount that. > Is there a clear reason for this? Yes. In the 1980s AI was teh new shiny and at that time, Lisp was almost synonymous with AI. A bunch of people over-promised when it came to AI and expert systems, and failed to deliver. And people conflated the failure of the promise of AI with the failure of Lisp. Essentially, guilt by association -- people can be dumb that way. Amusingly, once something in the realm of AI actually works -- we stop calling it AI. But one thing is for certain: the scruffies have been right more often than the neats. Still, Common Lisp is pretty effin' awesome.