| 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. |
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.