11–20 of 127 posts
Common Lisp doesn't have type checking and well defined namespace. And it has eval. That's certainly a no go for people like me. Most programmers in the world don't have to invent/implement a radical new idea in five minutes.
The hardware and the long standardisation process didn't help either. That, combined with it being both an old and a new language, meant that when the spec was done there wasn't the excitement you get with a new language like Python or Clojure. It missed the boat with building a web community and missed again in building hype.
However, Norvig is completely correct in saying that just because the CL language itself may not have taken off, doesn't mean the ideas didn't make it everywhere.
Where first there was discipline and hardly passed on conventions, there now would be statically enforced rule coerction.
I deeply believe that the utility of language is not in what it enables, but in what it forbids. For example Clojure and Rust have neat mechanisms to deal with mutability, where you need something extra to mutate a value. Contrast this to C where you need to go extra lenghts to make things const (ie nobody'll do it).
Is this even possible without writing your own tools?
Common Lisp doesn't have type checking and well defined namespace. And it has eval. That's certainly a no go for people like me. Most programmers in the world don't have to invent/implement a radical new idea in five minutes.
Eval? The entire point of Lisp macros is toying around with evalulation in a safe fashion. It's other languages that do it so dangerously that gives eval a bad name. Lisp is the shining example of how to do it right.
This means (in principle) that there is no guarantee that a Lisp compile will ever terminate.
I don't know why the OP is been down voted. Lisp is not for everyone and every application; I think that is a perfectly reasonable point of view.
Why on earth would it fix the world? It was a step forward in the history of programming languages; but somehow the end of it, the final fix? Why would anyone expect that? Programming languages are about providing a useful way for humans to formulate and implement their ideas. Starting by turning things on their head reverse polish notation style is bad start as it is counter intuitive to nearly everyone.
Have you met a Lisp advocate?
More seriously, programming is as you say a way of turning thoughts into mechanical implementations. But not everyone thinks the same way or finds the same things intuitive. So some people stumble across Lisp or Forth and find it matches their way of thinking so perfectly that they can't understand why not everyone agrees.
Pragmatism counts for a lot in programming language deployment too. There was no big platform that required or encouraged Lisp in the way that Sun did for Java, the browser does for Javascript, or web backend did for PHP and Perl.
I always assumed that were dressed up for the occasion and not really real; like someone doing a role playing game or maybe being Santa for the kids during Christmas.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
http://jordi.platinum.linux.pl/piccies/lisp.png
It's the most frequent complaint uttered against Lisp for a reason. All of the other things mentioned in the top responses are addressed by modern Lisp variants. If Rust or Swift were implemented with sexps and everything else about them were equal, they would have a lot of difficulty winning hearts and minds.
I'm pretty sure the biggest reason it hasn't caught on is the syntax. http://jordi.platinum.linux.pl/piccies/lisp.png It's the most frequent complaint uttered against Lisp for a reason. All of the other things mentioned in the top responses are addressed by modern Lisp variants. If Rust or Swift were implemented with sexps and everything else about them were equal, they would have a lot of difficulty winning hearts a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eval? The entire point of Lisp macros is toying around with evalulation in a safe fashion. It's other languages that do it so dangerously that gives eval a bad name. Lisp is the shining example of how to do it right.
AFAIK macros in Lisp are turing complete and executed at compile time. This means (in principle) that there is no guarantee that a Lisp compile will ever terminate. I don't know why the OP is been down voted. Lisp is not for everyone and every application; I think that is a perfectly reasonable point of view.
I don't think that failure to terminate compiles is too big a problem in practice; treat it as just another form of compile-time error and fix your program.
