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by SulphurCrested
1544 days ago
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The obvious answer as to why people aren't writing software is that almost all of the people able to write good software don't like the language and are writing software in some other language or for some other platform. I know Lisp enough to have written programs of a few thousand lines in it. I'm not even slightly fazed by functional programming and (tail-)recursion instead of loops. I've read Steele's Common Lisp book from cover to cover. Someone even tried to get me to interview for a job writing Lisp (I politely told them I thought their system could not practically be implemented in Lisp and was, several years and tens of millions of dollars later, eventually proven right). And I don't think the language has any redeeming features other than garbage collection and documentation, neither of which is notable in 2022. I'm someone familiar with the language who could quickly become productive in any decent Lisp, and that's what I think of Lisp. Can you imagine what a person new to the forest of parentheses, weird identifiers and rejection of 500 years of operator precedence notation thinks? |
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I'm curious to what that was, it sounds like a challenge more than anything.
I'm off a younger generation of programmers, and I've recently found lisp after coming from python. I still adore python and I can understand python's success, but I also adore lisp and its syntax, and I feel like I get the "powerful" argument for it.
For me, for what it's worth, I think the difficulties for lisp to join mainstream is really the thousands of little differences and gotchas that there's no single standard body looking after the users of the language. Princ instead of print, mapcars everywhere, etc. Trivial examples sure, but there's a lot that prevented me from making a few programs without doing through a book.
I'm not saying it's wrong, or it should be such and such a way. I am just simply comparing it to python and pointing to the first big elephant I come across.
Fwiw I also think that clojure is a lang that is capable of capturing more love because it's capable of tying in with Java ecosystem.. but it java is old and slow*; jobs in Java are slowing down, and clojure isn't filling in the gap, kotlin might be.
I take common lisp with me to holidays, because I like to learn it and all the funny words for things, but by far the lisp I use the most in day to day stuff is fennel, which is a lisp that compiles to Lua, and allows me to write plugins for neovim as well as a few other things that uses Lua.
TLDR: yes lisp needs software to be popular but it's not just a case of "make more applications" nor is the problem parents or operator precedence. People like sensibly named keywords.
I personally think things would be a little better if there was a CL to JavaScript transpilier, then you'd start to get some of the js crowd, same with python.