[wvenable]

Lisp is clever and also a but inhumane. It only ever appeals to the small subset of the population that likes that. Lisp has some niceties that are fundamentally inherent to its design but it's just not enough to overcome how awful it is for people.

But this is not a technical deficiency of Lisp, it's more of a technical deficiency of humans.

[throw10920]

What? How is Lisp (either the family of design decisions or even a specific language/implementation) "inhumane"? What does that even mean?

[wvenable]

Inhumane is the wrong word; brutalist is a better word. Brutalist architecture is characterized by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design. Human's are not logical/mathematical machines and all the irregular and decorative parts of programming languages are often for our benefit even if they're inconsistent, verbose, and limiting.

[_19qg]

That's not the experience a Lisp programmer has.

One is not looking at dead code, instead one is working with it interactively.

Lisp is not brutalist concrete, Lisp is wet clay in the programmer's hands.

The main way to program software in Lisp is extending it while it is running and with the development tools as much integrated as possible. Thus a Lisp program has maximum information about itself, there is no separate debug mode, no long build times, no static code.

[kazinator]

Lisps are fairly "decorative". It just doesn't combine a pin-striped blazer over a plaid shirt with leopard patterned pants, like many languages.

Here are some traditional notations found in Common Lisp:

  "string"
  symbol
  :keyword-sym
  #:gensym
  package:sym
  `(static content ,inserted ,@spliced)
  (l i s t)
  (im pro per li . st)
  #(v e c t o r)
  6.18e+23
  13/17
  ;; comment
  #*100111101101
  #1=(1 2 3 #1#) ;; circular structure
  #S(point :x 35 :y 44)

Various dialects have various notations. There is syntax highlighting support in editors, too.

Lisp is not just (this (and that)).

[wvenable]

And you imagine this is a contraction to what I said?

[kazinator]

Well, not exactly. What you said doesn't quite have the form which supports that sort of activity.

[throw10920]

> Brutalist architecture is characterized by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials

This definitely doesn't describe the semantics of most Lisps, which operate at the higher levels of abstraction and conceal many implementation and hardware details from you by default.

It also doesn't describe the syntax of most Lisps, including all of the major ones. Common Lisp, in particular, has extensive syntactic sugar, as shown in kazinator's post.

> structural elements over decorative design

I mean, Lisps don't usually go out of their way to look "pretty", but neither do they actively attempt to look ugly. Most Lisps' syntax has had design effort put into it - the authors strive for consistency and ergonomics.

Taste is subjective, and I personally strongly prefer the syntax of Common Lisp to C or Python - both in terms of aesthetic appearance, and in terms of ergonomics.

Furthermore, very few programming languages (excluding most Lisps and all major languages) are intentionally designed to be "decorative". Whitespace, for instance, is added into languages for readability and parsing determinism, not beauty or decorative appeal.

I don't think that this metaphor is accurate at all. There are many criticisms that you can make of both the Lisp family and specifically of Common Lisp, but I don't think that "brutalist" is a valid one.

[wvenable]

Why do you think Lisp never gained significant popularity?

I think I understand why certain people really like Lisp -- I have enough experience with enough programming languages to understand the appeal. But I also believe it's unappealing to the majority and I don't think that's a controversial stance. It's not a simple matter of syntax -- I don't think it can be fundamentally still be Lisp and be broadly appealing.

[throw10920]

> It's not a simple matter of syntax -- I don't think it can be fundamentally still be Lisp and be broadly appealing.

Python is, semantically, pretty similar to Common Lisp - they have far more in Common than they do with C++, for instance. So, even if it's not the syntax, it's clearly not the semantics or language behavior, either.

I'm pretty sure it's the syntax, though. You used the word "unappealing", which often refers to a surface attraction or draw. I think that this is absolutely correct - Lisps are unpopular in large part to their very weird syntax, and indeed, one of the most common comments that you'll hear when you bring up Lisp is "Is that the weird one with all of the parentheses?"

This is further reinforced by the fact that most programmers have never even tried to run a single line of a Lisp - and the vast majority haven't invested enough time to learn enough to write a non-trivial program with it, and therefore haven't had enough exposure to even judge whether they like the language or not. Therefore, any reason for unpopularity must be superficial.

[kazinator]

It's very easy to shallowly dismiss something if

- none of your friends or coworkers use it.

- there are few jobs requiring it.

Basically, you can mock it all you want with practically zero social risk.

Jokes that target people of some specific nationality or regional group are not as tolerated any more nowadays, perhaps depending on the social company, but this is like those jokes. For instance "dumb Polack" jokes.

You've heard the one: "Frederic Chopin and Nicolaus Copernicus walk into a bar, immediately bespying Marie Curie sitting by herself. Stanislaw Lem is tending bar, pouring her a drink. ..."

[kazinator]

I think the majority of developers simply don't know whether they would like Lisp or not. It's just not that well known.

Mainly, Lisp was developed on institutional hardware in the era of big iron. It became larger and more complicated, keeping up pace with the capabilities of those machines, which Lisp could easily strain.

Suddenly, microcomputers showed up in the 1970's. The industrial strength Lisps just wouldn't go down from hundreds of kilobytes or megabytes of RAM required down to two-digit kilobytes.

The situation didn't start to improve until probably the late 1980's.

Some developers used Lisp for prototyping, and had the expensive hardware; then to create a product to ship to users on consumer hardware, they rewrote the prototype. That story was exemplified by the CLIPS expert system.

An entire generation of programmers who started on microcomputers in the 1970's and 1980's wouldn't have even had opportunities to use Lisp.

When I started programming in 1982 or so, I inherited a stack of Creative Computing magazine back issues, so I read about all sorts of interesting stuff, including Lisp; but I wouldn't have been able to get my hands on it anywhere: and not for the lack of knowing about it or wanting.

Microcomputers steam-rolled a vast amount of software that preceded them. Software that didn't make the jump from big iron to microcomputers either died or was relegated to niches. Fortran, Cobol, operating systems like Multics, you name it.

We use Unix-like systems today because Unix started on minicomputers that were close in capability to microcomputers. There was only a small lag time between Unix being "bigger iron only" to running on microcomputers. It used pretty modest resources; e.g in 1980, /vmunix was maybe 50-something kilobytes. But even that was a little bit large, and the microcomputer jump did hurt Unix; it allowed disk operating systems like CP/M, PC-DOS and MS-DOS to gain a foothold. Unix never quite recovered; we now have free versions that are quite popular, but mostly in serving and embedded.

Speaking of Unix, I read a book on using Unix in the mid 1980's. As a kid. I had nowhere to actually access it for hands-on experience, but was exciting to read about. You had to be a university student, or else a grown-up working at some company or institution. (Or else, dial into something and break in.)

Anyways, the time lag between the start of the microcomputer revolution, and Lisp being able to run well like on 1970 big iron, was quite long! Long enough to see people retire. There is nobody out there to do mentoring. If millions of programmers started to be interested in Lisp, there would be nobody available for mentoring. Everyone would have to use just books and such. You can hardly find a course to take or anything like that. Some universities use some Lisp or Scheme dialect in a few courses, and that's about it.

Even if every great Lisp hacker who ever lived was still alive and interested in mentoring, it wouldn't be enough; there simply weren't that many people in computing 30, 40, 50 years ago.

[wvenable]

Lisp was invented 60 years ago and we're still talking about it today, right now. I don't think the issue is that isn't well known. Plenty of programming languages have sprung to life in that time from nothing and became more popular.

Lisp is more capable now than any time in it's history and if you wanted to learn about it then there's also no better time in history to do that than right now.