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by reikonomusha 2494 days ago
I’m interested in why you asked 100s of developers if they’re interested in Lisp.

In my experience, which is evidently quite different to yours, excellent developers also want to increase their breadth, understand which tools are good for which jobs, and generally increase their knowledge about programming and software engineering. It’s usually the poorer engineers, experienced or not, that stick to just a few tools with no knowledge of others.
1 comments
madiathomas 2494 days ago
They talk about what they are interested in on a daily basis. You don't even need to ask them. They will tell you.

There are millions of development tools in this world. No-one has time to learn all the tools. Even if they want to. I don't understand why LISP have to be the only exception when coming to tools a Developer can ignore. I doubt Linus Torvalds has time to learn every obscure technology out there. He focuses on delivering kick-ass solutions using C. Same as other great Programmers. It is the book writers and consultants who are busy learning each and every tool.

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lispm 2494 days ago
A bunch of programming language developers learned Lisp and were influenced by it: James Gosling (Java), Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby), Brendan Eich (JavaScript), Alan Kay (Smalltalk), Robin Milner (ML), ...

Hardly 'book writers and consultants'. These are among the most influential people for programmers... if you had learned Lisp decades ago, you would have learned much of the basics for those newer languages: managed runtimes, evaluation, automatic memory management, programming with first class functions, virtual byte code machines, etc etc...

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madiathomas 2494 days ago
Then we should relegate LISP to an academic programming language and stop pretending that it is a major player when all the data proves the contrary. LISP failed for half a century because it isn't the best tool for the job, not because we are just stupid and only the select few have the brains for it. It is not the case. It is just not good for the job at hand -> delivering solutions.

I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP. I didn't see any resemblence of LISP on any of them. To correct you, Java was heavily influenced by C/C++, not LISP. In such a way that my transition fron C++ to Java only took me few hours.

"Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material." - Alan Kay

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lispm 2493 days ago
Btw., 'LISP' is now 'Lisp'.

> Then we should relegate LISP to an academic programming language and stop pretending that it is a major player when all the data proves the contrary. LISP failed for half a century because it isn't the best tool for the job, not because we are just stupid and only the select few have the brains for it. It is not the case. It is just not good for the job at hand -> delivering solutions.

Nobody claims that it is a major player. My claim was that it was influential - not academic, but actually practically. People like Matz (Ruby) literally learned how to implement a programming language runtime by studying Lisp, in this case the Emacs Lisp runtime.

> I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP.

Nobody said it's required. It's just that when you knew Lisp, you would have already known about garbage collection, first class functions, virtual byte code machines, managed memory, etc. Nothing which is directly in C++.

> I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP. I didn't see any resemblence of LISP on any of them. To correct you, Java was heavily influenced by C/C++, not LISP. In such a way that my transition fron C++ to Java only took me few hours.

If you don't know Lisp, how would you know which influence it had on Java? C/C++ had directly no Garbage Collection, no managed memory, no runtime code loading (-> Java class loader), ... thus these things about the Java runtime were not coming from C/C++. You got the curly braces from C/C++.

Guy Steele, who co-wrote the Java language spec: '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.'

And you even didn't notice it...

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madiathomas 2493 days ago
Curly braces, for loops, while loops, if statements, case statements, variable declaration and initialisation etc. All those things were carbon copied from C/C++, not Lisp.

The features you mentioned aren't part of the Java language, they are tools used by Java language. JVM isn't part of Java as a language, they are part of the Java platform. Most people confuse the language with the platform. JVM is a tool used by the language. Even Javac isn't part of Java. It is a tool used to compile Java [1].

I doubt any Java Programmer was dragged halfway to Lisp. If it was the case, we were going to see at least 10% of those Developers finishing the trip to Lisp but we didn't. That's why Lisp remains an obscure language used by 100 people on a good day.

[1] http://sheikyerbouti.developpez.com/tmp/j2se5.gif

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lispm 2493 days ago
> Curly braces, for loops, while loops, if statements, case statements, variable declaration and initialisation etc. All those things were carbon copied from C/C++, not Lisp.

That's all minor stuff. But, even the very invention of conditional statements are originally from Lisp. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/node1.html John McCarthy proposed if/then/else and recursion to the Algol (the grandfather of C) community in 59.

> JVM isn't part of Java as a language

Historically there is no independent invention of the Java language. The Java language was developed together for and with the platform -> the JVM. Thus Java assumed on day one that it runs on a garbage collected platform.

> I doubt any Java Programmer was dragged halfway to Lisp.

There are a bunch of Java developers which struggle with Lisp-derived languages (like Clojure).

> If it was the case, we were going to see at least 10% of those Developers finishing the trip to Lisp but we didn't.

You didn't know where many of the features of the Java runtime come from or where they originated from. The originally first garbage collected language implementation was Lisp 1 in the end 50s. Here on Hackernews you can learn about it. Java (originally called oak) was explicitly designed to be garbage collected. The Java developers (Gosling) explicitly didn't want C++ like memory management.

> That's why Lisp remains an obscure language used by 100 people on a good day.

I have no idea where you get your numbers from.

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