Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

hanshuebner.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#11

Post by pjmlp »

hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

Lisp workstations were quite expensive with proprietary source code, while UNIX workstation were built on source code available almost for free (AT&T could not sell it so they licensed it for a symbolic price), which made them cheaper to sell.

Also the companies involved in selling Lisp machines did quite a few management errors.

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#13

Post by davexunit »

hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

It all comes back to the "worse is better" thing. Frequently enough the technologies in mainstream usage are not the best, technically speaking. Mainstream programming languages are still playing catch up on the features that the Lisp family of languages has had for decades. UNIX succeeded not because it was the best OS of the time (it wasn't, MIT made much better systems) but it had a killer feature: it ran on commodity hardware, the PDP-11.

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#14

Post by Jtsummers »

hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

What does mainstream have to do with quality? There's a lot of crap that's mainstream in most industries. I don't see why ours would be any different (especially as fad-driven as programming tends to be).

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#17

Post by patrickmay »

hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

Because Brendan Eich's management lied to him about allowing him to do Scheme in the browser: https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

When I think of what web programming could have been like, it makes me want to weep.

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#18

Post by fusiongyro »

hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

A more powerful language is not enough of an advantage to defeat entrenched alternatives with strong network effects. There isn't a reason why language X is not entrenched, but there are historical reasons why C, C++ and Java are entrenched. Lisp just isn't enough more powerful than them to beat their home-court advantage. I guess I'd say, Lisp might be 10x better, but the network effects are orders of magnitude more meaningful than that intrinsic benefit.

It's not a very meaningful answer to the question, but it's a bit like asking why Todd isn't rich when we all know Todd is a smart guy. It's because getting rich takes more than raw intelligence.

Suppose you have a wildly evolving field where nobody can really predict what technologies are going to be successful in the market beyond the next five years or so. Suppose you have no internet. Suppose there are thousands of programmers with the ability to invent a language. Wouldn't you expect that some of them will, by happenstance, wind up on successful products and become successful while others stay relatively unknown? That's the birth of the mainstream programming languages and their antecedents in the 70s and early 80s.

Re: Lisp Machine Manual (1984)

#20

Post by [deleted] »

fusiongyro wrote: post #18
hoodoof wrote: post #2

There seems to be plenty of people who think Lisp is awesome. If so, then why hasn't it become "mainstream"?

A more powerful language is not enough of an advantage to defeat entrenched alternatives with strong network effects. There isn't a reason why language X is not entrenched, but there are historical reasons why C, C++ and Java are entrenched. Lisp just isn't enough more powerful than them to beat their home-court advantage. I guess I'd say, Lisp might be 10x better, but the network effects are orders of magnitude more…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN