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by skocznymroczny
2234 days ago
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I think the problem is looking at the prism of being the most "powerful" or "expressive" language and ignoring everything around it. Go and Java programmers don't use their language over Lisp because they are masochists and enjoy the exercise of programming in a less expressive language. They choose their languages because of ease of use, large healthy ecosystems (compiler and libraries) and excellent IDE support. I sometimes see similarities in the D crowd. Because D has such advanced metaprogramming capabilities, it also suffers from parts of the Lisp curse. Too often, any criticism of D or comparison is rebuked with "but you can do it in D using this template magic and there's a package that partially implements it". |
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1. "Ease of use" describes Go reasonably well (anyone who has used a compiled language can figure out Go tooling in minutes), but I've never found it to be true for Java. Whichever you think is better, I don't think there is a case for Maven or Gradle being an order-of-magnitude easier to use than ASDF.
2. The "large healthy ecosystem" from the libraries point of view is a silly argument for Go, since 10 years ago Lisp clearly had the larger ecosystem. Something is fundamentally different (socially, technically, or otherwise) from Lisp to Go that Go could grow the library ecosystem it has from zero in a decade, while Common Lisp could not in 25 years.
3. The "large healthy ecosystem" from the compiler point of view is silly; Lisp has 2 healthy commercial implementations (Lispworks, Allegro), 3 very actively maintained open-source implementations (sbcl, ccl, ecl), plus several other "somewhat maintained" implementations. Thats almost Java plus Go put together.
4. It's funny you mention IDE support, because tooling in general, and SLIME specifically is what keeps me using Lisp. Java actually has fairly solid IDE support, but outside of the Smalltalk world, I've never seen anything even close to SLIME in terms of being a useful IDE.