[tyromaniac]

We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p

Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

[blubber]

Common lisp isn't functional in that sense.

[zellyn]

When I learned (Common) Lisp at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1995, we were encouraged to make as many functions as possible purely functional, and if mutation was needed, to try to hide it within the bounds of a function.

So while Lisp may not be purely functional, the culture hewed that way.

[tyromaniac]

Sure the language might not be immutable but the lisp machine alt universe's "overton window" would I imagine be more functional then today's (JVM? maybe that's the qnalog?) reality.

[dismalaf]

Common Lisp is pretty much the opposite of what people think of as functional nowadays. You're constantly changing the image and everything is mutable.

[agumonkey]

yeah it's a strange aspect of that lisp era, it was born in mccarthy's recursive functions over recursive lists.. and then interactive development over global state added as a layer.

i would argue that lispers use of mutability was much more surgical and principled but maybe i'm biased

[dismalaf]

McCarthy's pure Lisp existed only on paper. The first Lisp that ran on a computer had mutable variables, as did Lisp 1.5, Maclisp, etc...

Immutability requires lots of copying and early computers didn't have much memory to spare...

[pfdietz]

Image saving isn't something that's done very often, in practice.

[tyromaniac]

I would presume there was a lot of mixing of imperative/functional in the 80s where this alt universe starts. I think the same type of world in which lisp machines would have become king would also be similar

[muvlon]

Yeah, all the common lispers I know are all about interacting with "live" programs as opposed to "dead", compiled ones. Nix takes the last live, mutable, reflectable part of the world of programmers today, the OS itself, and turns it into a dead program as well. So common lispers tend to hate Nix with a passion (as do Smalltalk users).

[attila-lendvai]

i'm a lisper, and i don't hate nix. i prefer guix, for sure, but i don't see this hatered you're talking about among other lispers either.

[neutronicus]

> Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Yeah, that, uh, doesn't sound like Lisp