[ux266478]

You're using Lisp software right now!

I think this is the most treacherous assumption people tend to make about programming languages, for a few reasons. One of them is that we really don't have any way to measure software that we actually use day to day.

Think about the software controlling your local water treatment plant, traffic lights, the software your local power company relies on, the software running the servers you connect to, and all the servers those things connect to. All the infrastructure in between and the infrastructure's own infrastructure. Allegro Lisp's customers are shotgun spread in industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing. They're paying for it, so we can infer they're using it, but can anybody actually name what software is written in it?

If we play six degrees of separation, accounting for the full gamut of every single computer that does something relevant to your life no matter how distant, how much of that software are you actually familiar with? The fact of the matter is that we genuinely have no broad picture. There is no introspective method to find out what software you are relying on in your day to day life, almost all of it is completely opaque and implicit. To ask "what software do I use?" is to ask an unanswerable question. So to then synthesize an answer is to work with an unsound, unsupported, incomplete conclusion, which is exactly how you end up assuming you don't use software written in Lisp, while directly using software written in Lisp (HN)

Of course, even accounting for the epistemic issue, the premise is still flawed. ATS is a language with 'useful ideas, but...', Haskell is an aging pragmatic kitchen sink. Positioning the latter as the former is almost comedic.

[pydry]

That's a lot of words to say a lot of FUD.

I know people who work in the embedded space working on stuff similar to traffic lights and LISP isnt even on their radar. Rust is. LISP isnt.

Every niche language has its fanboys who can end up using it all over the place but when it doesnt spread to non fanboys there is usually a reason to which they are wilfully blind, usually related to its practical value.

[iLemming]

> Every niche language

Lisp is not a really a programming language. It is an idea.

Lisp didn't emerge the way most languages do - someone sitting down to design syntax and features for practical software engineering. McCarthy was formalizing a notation for computation itself, building on Church's lambda calculus. The fact that it turned out to be implementable was almost a surprise.

And that origin story matters because it explains why Lisp keeps regenerating. Most languages are artifacts - they're designed, they peak, they fossilize. Lisp is more like a principle that keeps getting re-instantiated: Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, Fennel, Jank. Each one is radically different in philosophy and pragmatics, yet they all share something that isn't really about parentheses - it's about code-as-data, minimal syntax hiding maximal abstraction, and the programmer's ability to reshape the language to match the problem rather than the reverse.

The counterargument, of course, is that at some point the idea has to become concrete to be useful, and once it does, it's subject to all the same engineering tradeoffs as any other language. Rich Hickey for example made very specific, opinionated decisions that are engineering choices, not mathematical inevitabilities. So there's a productive tension between Lisp-as-idea and any particular Lisp-as-language.

> related to its practical value.

Don't be daft, preaching pragmatics to modern Lispers is like trying to explain synaptic connections and their plasticity to neurosurgeons. They already know what's what - tis you who's clueless.

[ux266478]

You're all over the place here. Yes a chunk of my post is about the epistemic impossibility of knowing what software you rely on. I had to look up what FUD means, I assume it's just an algorithmbrained primitive cognate of epistemic skepticism.

At no point does a post about "You can't draw sweeping conclusions about this kind of thing" imply "all dark matter tech relies on esoteric stacks". I'm not sure why you would even bring up that anecdote?

> there is usually a reason to which they are willfully blind, usually related to its practical value.

Lame passive aggression aside, I'm not a Lisp "fanboy" and I actively don't like the grain of the language. Language adoption is always down to familiarity, taste and ecosystem constraints. But I'm also not deluded enough to assert something like this because I actually know better. It's an argument that's always positioned without substance, because there can be none. You're positioning ignorant snobbishness as enlightened pragmatism, no offense but that's just pretense. If you can't get a Lisp program working on a 100mhz microcontroller with 5k of flash, that's kind of a skill issue dude.