Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wvenable 1541 days ago
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.

1 comments

Lisp is absolutely not well known. Some programmers may know the word Lisp and that it refers to some kind of programming language, the same way that they might know about Fortran, and possibly Algol, PL/I or Snobol. People talking about it today are not average programmers.

I agree that there is no better time than now, but at the same time, the ratio of Lisp experts to total developers may also be at an all-time low.

But why do you need experts? Plenty of languages have been created out of nothing in the last few decades and have more users than Lisp. Obviously a new language starts with zero experts.

And Lisp has experts! You're literally posting this to a massively popular forum for developers and it's written in a Lisp dialect!

Reddit, arguably one of the largest sites on the Internet, was written in Common Lisp before being re-written in Python.