| > I politely told them I thought their system could not practically be implemented in Lisp. 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. |