[daly]

Who cares if Lisp is popular?

The "lisp epiphany" is real. Either you "get it" or "you don't".

I've been writing lisp programs for 50 years. I've been paid to program in 60 different languages but nothing compares with lisp.

There is an intellectual "distance" between a problem and its machine solution. I call this the "impedence problem". Lisp lets you think at the most abstract and write to the most specific.

Writing changed the world. But if you give most people a blank piece of paper they don't know what to do with such freedom. Lisp is the "blank piece of paper" of programming languages. Everything, literally everything, comes from you.

I loved my Symbolics machine. It was the closest expression of a "thinking platform" I've ever used. IDEs are horrible for thinking, ever interrupting at every keystroke.

Lisp isn't "popular" because it provides a "thinking platform" you can shape to your thoughts.

Lisp will never be popular. The reason should be obvious.

[mbrodersen]

A number of Lisp fans seems to care. That’s why we regularly see articles on HN trying to convince other developers to use Lisp. It has been going on for years. Article after article written by frustrated Lisp fans, not understanding why the language they love is not mainstream. Often making bizarre claims about non-Lisp developers not being smart enough to “get” Lisp or whatever. Not having a clue that most developers care about a lot more than just the programming language. The best way to show the “power” of Lisp is to develop commercially successful software using it. That will do way more to convince smart developers to try out Lisp than writing yet another Lisp article trying to “sell” Lisp.

[daly]

For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough".

My claim is that Lisp is perfect for thinking about a new idea or a new approach.

For example, I implemented a program that merged Expert Systems and Knowledge Representation into a single system (KROPS) that allowed a domain expert to express their knowledge as rules or as facts. Anything the system learned by either method could be expressed in either representation. Thus, the two representations were "unified".

Another effort involved Human-Robot Cooperation to change a car tire (TIRES). The system could interact with the human through pseudo-natural language, learn rules dynamically, and expand its knowledge base of the current situation in real time. So the system self-modifies and learns through human interaction on the task.

Both of these systems required self-modifying code which is rather more difficult to do in other languages. In Lisp this is trivial.

As for commercial sales witness:

Axiom, a 1.2 million line Computer Algebra program written in Common Lisp, was sold commercially by the Numerical Algorithms Group.

YESOPS, an IBM Expert System program implemented in Common Lisp, was sold commercially.

[mbrodersen]

> For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough".

I am glad to hear that.

[mbrodersen]

It’s great that there is commercially successful software written in Lisp. However a lot more needs to be written in Lisp to compete with the hundreds of thousands of commercially successful applications written in other languages. I don’t think that will ever happen. But that’s fine of course. Pick the language that makes you happy and work with that. It doesn’t have to be a popular language to make you happy.

[lispm]

> frustrated Lisp fans

Why be frustrated? For example I'm using the latest Apple Silicon laptop and there are a dozen Lisp (and related) systems already ported to it. Years ago it took a lot longer to move to a new platform, especially for open source software implementations with native code compilers.

Happy times.

[mbrodersen]

I agree. Nothing stops Lisp fans from using Lisp for their own projects. The fact that Lisp isn’t popular, and probably never will be, really shouldn’t matter.