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> Plenty of people hate any or all of those things. Oh come on. You're flummoxed about things that are not controversial. You don't have to listen to some rando HN commenter like me - there isn't a line-up of renowned CS figures or prominent programmers who ever harshly criticized Lisp to absolute rejection, even Dijkstra. People expect him to have bashed Lisp, but he actually praised it (and not once): "Lisp has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts." And there's a long line of well-known names from Alan Kay to Steele, Matz and Goetz, etc. who publicly said great things about the grand idea of Lisp. That is all well-documented and known. This isn't some "recorded history of the past", it's still going on - Clojure-like languages for different runtimes popping up every few months. Lisp isn't BASIC, Fortran or COBOL, yet some people waste so much energy to prove to themselves that it's somehow "wrong" or has "bad consequences", while Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects. All the while so many "opposing" ideas quietly died over the years - Ada's intended universal dominance; anti-GC dogma; Algol 68 complexity-heavy direction (though Algol's good ideas lived on); rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted. What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance? I suppose an ignorant one. I get it, plenty of serious programmers acknowledge the influence and still rationally choose not to use it, but outright rejecting the idea because it doesn't "visually appeal to them" - that is some naivete. Whatever. You free to hold any beliefs - my actual, pragmatic, lived experience says otherwise. |
About the ideas, yes, helped by being such an early language that it can lay claim to being the originator of a great many things. About the syntax, rather fewer.
> Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects
There are a great many success stories and just as many failure stories. 60+ years on, Lisp continues to exist but remains niche.
> rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted.
Yes and no; the pendulum swings but the oscillations get smaller. At this point the programming world has pretty much converged on present-but-lightweight typing with inference and optional annotations, for example; there are no new serious pure dynamic languages being made, and all major dynamic languages are putting huge effort into retrofitting typing. Long edit-deploy-test cycles aren't coming back but nor is live-editing your production system.
> What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance?
That's quite a different thing from saying that it's pleasant or even good. Every serious critic acknowledges that e.g. David Foster Wallace was influential and important, but many openly hate actually reading his work.
> actual, pragmatic, lived experience
Hardly. You've built this a whole edifice of beliefs that wouldn't withstand 5 minutes outside the Lisp bubble.