[pjc50]

As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.

It has become yet another community that's fighting a struggle that everyone else ended years ago, like the few Japanese in jungles who refused to surrender. I'm not entirely sure why it's not been adopted, but I suspect it's because most people strongly prefer (a) visually semantically different scope delimiters and (b) function-outside-brackets syntax ie f(a, b) rather than (f a b).

Or you could go the other way and say that JSON is s-exps with curly brackets so it should be made executable as such, and build that language.

[eadmund]

> As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.

That's probably true, but I think it's useful to fight the good fight regardless. Even if Lisp & s-expressions don't, in fact, take over the world (and I think they will), arguing in their favour might help increase the chance that whatever inferior technology does end up getting adopted is better than it could have been.

> Or you could go the other way and say that JSON is s-exps with curly brackets so it should be made executable as such, and build that language.

The problem is that without symbols, that ends up being hideously ugly. This:

    ["if",
     ["<", 1, 2],
     "less than",
     "greater than or equal to"
    ]

is appreciably worse than:

    (if (< 1 2)
        "less than"
        "greater than or equal too")

And alternatives like:

    {"if": [[1, "<", 2], "less than", "greater than or equal to"]}

are so much worse that I don't think anyone could seriously expect to use them.

[mschaef]

> It has become yet another community that's fighting a struggle that everyone else ended years ago, ... like the few Japanese in jungles who refused to surrender.

Nice imagery, but the wrong point.

Except for the syntax, everybody else joined Lisp.

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." --Guy Steele

Flash back to the mid-1980's (when the mainstream was C, Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc.) and it's Lisp/Scheme (and Smalltalk) that have features like Garbage Collection, interactive development, lexical closures, decent built-in data structures, dynamic typing.

The fact that all of this is commonplace today, both justifies a lot what Lisp did in the first half of its existence and undermines its (technical) competitive advantages now.

> but I suspect it's because most people strongly prefer (a) visually semantically different scope delimiters and (b) function-outside-brackets syntax ie f(a, b) rather than (f a b).

It's not technical. I don't think it ever was. So much of it is around social concerns: a performance stigma dating back to the 1970's, fear of being able to hire people to do the work, fear of what VC's will think, worries that the language will still be available... And then at the end of the day, the problems whatever language will solve are a tiny fraction of the overall problem of doing something relevant and lasting and useful to others.

> As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.

Life is too short and the world is too big to try to confine other people's ideas of how they should think or work.

The point of the market economy and of the scientific process is that people get to try what they think is going to be useful and then let the world decide. The fact that Lisp is still in the conversation at all, when its contemporaries (Autocoder, Fortran) either aren't or are highly specialized, says a lot that we can learn from.

[kkarakk]

>As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.

Mean girls came out in 2004, no kid knows that movie

[lenkite]

Oh my! So web-assembly is not 'happening' then ? May it REST in peace.