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by doug_durham 9 days ago
You think that LISP and Smalltalk aren't widely used is because they weren't easy to implement in the late 1980's? There have been many languages that have risen to prominence in the 40 years since, yet LISP and Smalltalk remain niche languages.
2 comments
skydhash 9 days ago
My opinion is that Lisp and Smalltalk are too pure and abstract. C is heavily tied to the real world of computing and can be easier to grasp for beginner. But try to explain variable bindings (instead of assignment) or message passing (instead of function calls) to a beginner in programming. It’s not that they’re hard to explain or understand, they’re just hard to be completely grasped without a foundation in computer science. They’re too alien.
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igouy 8 days ago
Which new languages have risen to prominence outside of a niche?
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doug_durham 8 days ago
Rust, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, Swift to start with. These are languages with very wide adoption. Objective-C is very Smalltalk-like, but it is being phased out for Swift.
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0xpgm 8 days ago
These became popular after Moore's law made it possible many years after C/Unix had become the standard.

And they became just good enough that more people didn't go into Lisp/Smalltalk instead.

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