[kleiba]

Unfortunately, the post spends most of its length on the author's professional history. It is only towards the end in which he spends a sentence or two talking about when he "lost his faith" in Lisp, but still gives not a lot of reasons. Basically, as far as I can tell, there are two major points: he used to think Lisp is great, but (1) no-one else seems to be using it and (2) the perceived superiority of Lisp was debunked when he observed experts in other programming languages.

Perhaps his priors were a bit off (seeing Lisp as the holy grail of all programming languages), but I think it is still fair to ask why Lisp has failed commercially? This has been discussed before, however (Lisp "wars" in the 80s, AI winter, etc.)

I find the way he ends his post interesting, where he argues that Lips has to evolve and improve. The article is from 2002 and in the mean time, a lot has actually happened in the Lisp world. New dialects like arc and clojure have created a renewed interest in Lisps. It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.

[brlewis]

I think you summarized his reasons correctly, but I see his reasons as faulty.

(1) assumes that if a technology is good, it will see steady adoption over time. This is not true. See "Why didn't the Romans have hot air ballons" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264998

About (2) I want to phrase my criticism carefully. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ron is a generally egotistical person, any more than your typical programmer, or than myself. What I am saying is that (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. It's akin to seeing someone take a better picture with a cheap camera than you take with your expensive one, and losing faith in expensive cameras. Or like listening to someone make a song sound better on an upright piano than you make it sound on a grand piano. The Python programmers who knocked him off his high horse at Google are not proof that Python is better.

[lisper]

> (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning.

To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.

[brlewis]

When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)

[lisper]

> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought

No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would.

> Maybe those people are just really smart

You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.

[Xurinos]

Unfamiliarity? Discomfort? The choice could be emotional as opposed to intellectual. Smart people can spend a lot of time and effort defending the status quo.

[brlewis]

This deserves more discussion. I won't be able to do it justice today, but hope to restart the discussion later, maybe with a comment on your blog.

[lisper]

You might want to read this:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...

(Submitted to HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314572 -- but it died with a whimper.)

[lisper]

> It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.

I am very encouraged by the developments of the last 9 years. Clojure in particular is a Good Thing (notwithstanding my on-going allergy to Java), and even the Common Lisp landscape to day is much improved over what it was in 2002. Clozure Common Lisp in particular is wicked cool, and I'm using it for some hacking projects on the side. But when it comes time to do something industrial strength it would still be a very tough call for me even today.

I would love to do a Lisp-based startup, and a CL based startup in particular. If anyone out there shares this interest please let me know.

[civil]

It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.

"Erann Gat" and "Ron Garret" are the same person; you find him on c.l.l. regularly since 2004.

[nostrademons]

He's also occasionally on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lisper

[didip]

Is he that Ron, the xoogler, who was forced to use Java on AdWords?

Edit: Yup.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/xooglers.html

    So I was a little disappointed when I found out
    on day 1 that I had been assigned to the ads group.
    But that disappointment turned to dismay when I learned
    what my assignment was to be: I was the lead engineer
    on a new advertising system code named "adstoo", what
    eventually became AdWords. That part wasn't so bad.
    The bad part was, this was going to be the inaugural
    Java project at Google. Google, which had until now
    been a Java-free zone (which was one of the reasons I
    took the job) was going for Java in a big way, and I,
    the consummate Java hater, was supposed to be its
    chief evangelist.

    Just peachy.

[nipra]

http://www.flownet.com/gat/eg-rg-faq.html

[biot]

Update from 2008: http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...