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It's relevant in the sense of being a reply to "we need software written in Lisp" and how, if you substitute Java and say "we need software written in Java", people would just shrug and ask "why do we?". People are saying "we need sofware written in Rust" and other people are asking "why?" and one answer is "to avoid the memory and race condition problems we have from C and C++ code". Maybe correct or not, maybe compelling or not, but it's a practical, outward-looking concrete reason. The answer for Lisp from your comment is "The success of Lisp doesn't depend on the existence of fancy machines, it depends on people choosing to write software in it" and that's the kind of self-referential Ouroboros loop I mentioned. "OK but why?". The success of COBOL depends on people choosing to code in COBOL, but nobody uses that as a reason to support COBOL. People who identify as "Lisp programmers" are going to care about that because if it dies, their identity dies (which is daft because as you say, anyone can choose to write a LISP environment at any time). > "Many have claimed that it's not even possible to write a game that doesn't blow because Lisp is dynamically typed and garbage collected. Now the goalposts have moved to, "well, it takes 1GB of memory and doesn't even look like it's from 2022."" JavaScript appeared, took over the world, demonstrated good games in a dynamically typed and garbage collected language at least a decade ago. Goalposts move, time moves on. Some AI people complain "once you wanted AI to beat chess, now that's not good enough? Stop moving goalposts!". Software today can recognise people, generate images from text descriptions, complete sentences, describe photos, self-drive cars over constrained environments, walk robots over rough terrain and jump onto ledges, steady cameras on flying drones following a person. DeepBlue beating Kasparov was impressive in 1996, it's not impressive now. There are AI experts today who were born after that. Especially contrasted with "it's the best language", "superlative applications", linking something which looks like software of 25 years ago on 10,000x less powerful computers is a big difference in expectations. (It may actually be an amazing game, hence me asking what it was that made you say it is, before it's released). Years ago a company writing Transport Tycoon in assembler was very impressive. Now a single person can write a math animation video generator in Python as a hobby side-project while being a double-major student.[1] Expectations ramp up, year on year, and "coding on the libraries of giants" is a real effect. Pythagoras calculating the length of a hypotenuse was impressive. A school student doing it today isn't. Hacker News is written in Arc. It's impressive to build a language and build a forum in that language, even though forums existed years ago. But if someone claimed it was the best language which needs to be preserved because it can do the best things, and then used HN as the example, anyone who has used a modern forum with all the trimmings would do the "yes, Grandpa, everything was better in the old days" polite smiling and nodding. Electron isn't bad because it lacks Lisp, it's bad because it's sluggish and ramps up fans and drains battery life. WhatsApp isn't great because it was written in Erlang, it's great because it connected hundreds of millions of people on all kinds of featurephones and early smartphones. Visual Studio Code isn't very customisable because it's written in JavaScript, it's customisable because they built it to have lots of extension points. The answer to why we need software written in Lisp is like the answer to why we need software written in APL or Prolog: we don't. We also don't need softwre written in Java or C# or Python or Ruby. We may need software written in C, x64 Assembler, because of hardware lock-in. Tools are for doing things with, not for falling in love with. [1] https://www.3blue1brown.com/about |
In isolation and without context: We do not need software written in Lisp. Nothing compels us to choose Lisp as a language to express programs that solve problems.
If we want a non-UNIX, non-C ecosystem, then what we need is software, not hardware. Lisp is one type of previously proven ecosystem that works. So it is reasonable to discuss that as a potential option, which is partly the topic of the article we both are posting comments to. I argue that if we want a Lisp ecosystem, we need better and more comprehensive software written in Lisp.
If we don't want a non-UNIX, non-C ecosystem, then we needn't discuss writing software in Lisp (or Smalltalk or ...) as a possible solution to that (non-)problem.
In any case, I simply argue that old hardware or even obsolete operating systems aren't really a productive thing to talk about in this context, except on a case-by-case basis.
Again, regarding "superlative", the word is in reference to last-decade Lisp software alone, which I contend describes Kandria. I don't even attempt to compare software written in Lisp to the entire universe and history of software, which it seems you're doing, but doesn't seem pertinent to the discussion. (Though, to be clear, even when comparing to all of that, I still think you're wrong. But we can argue to no end about our own subjective opinions.)