Why Lisp Is Unpopular • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#51

Post by hernan7 » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 5:48 PM UTC

In my opinion, if you don't learn Lisp at school, picking it up later in your spare time is going to be quite a task.

After reading and doing the exercises from the Touretzky book and The Little Schemer, plus some articles here and there on the 'Net my experience was:

1) Lisps have their annoyances like all languages. Lots of little non-intuitive keywords to memorize, the dotted pairs, quite the baroque computation model (variables having sub-variables, etc.), the FOR syntax, DO, etc. Not a deal breaker, but annoying. (Touretzky seems to fixate excessively on some of these weird traits of Lisp.)

2) If your Math chops are rusty, you are going to have to work twice as hard. Mine are, and I had to. If you are fresh from taking your Computability Theory course, then recursion and infix are going to be second nature. If you haven't been doing Math for a while, it's going to be hard. Another reason to learn Lisp while in college.

3) You can learn the syntax in 2 hours, yes, but to really know Lisp you need to really understand recursion, continuations, thunks, macros, multiple dispatch, all the fine points of object orientation (to understand the CLOS) and who knows what else. Basically, you need to have a deep understanding of, well, all of CS? This is not something that can be learned on your spare time unless you have lots of it.

In my case, I am starting The Seasoned Schemer now, and taking it slowly, under no illusion that I am going to learn Lisp any time soon. I may well be that I am one of those "stupid programmers" that are unsuited for Lisp. Oh well...

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#52

Post by pchristensen » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 5:50 PM UTC

boucher wrote: post #38

gordianknot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all interesting failures. They are important for their effect on languages that will last longer (Lisp, ECMAScript) though. Edit: I don't mean these are "failures" now, just that they're doomed in the long run. Does anyone think they'll be able to stand any of these languages in 2018? I don't they'll have evolved much by that point either. The older a language gets, the harder it is fo…

Like it or not, I don't think you can call any of those languages failures. Certainly not PHP, Python, or Ruby. I would venture to guess that all three are more commonly used than Lisp.

Failure in the Grahammian sense of being a dead-end.

"I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language." - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#53

Post by boucher » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 5:54 PM UTC

gordianknot wrote: post #40

boucher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, I don't think you can call any of those languages failures. Certainly not PHP, Python, or Ruby. I would venture to guess that all three are more commonly used than Lisp.

I mean failure like the tyrannosaurus rex. That is, from an an evolutionary perspective. Not at the arbitrary present. And I'd wager that Perl is still actually more used than Python or Ruby, it just doesn't get the love on social news sites and elite blogs.

I think Perl has been relegated to short scripts and legacy code bases. I don't see a lot of new projects being developed in Perl. That's what I meant by leaving it off the list.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#54

Post by pchristensen » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 5:54 PM UTC

gordianknot wrote: post #21

lst wrote: post #12

Lisp is not unpopular (look at all the programming newbies around!), it's simply much misunderstood (like many of the high-end solutions, because its simple looking base is all but trivial...)

What's the misunderstanding exactly?

People like stuff that looks familiar but harder. To someone raised on C-style code, Lisp looks foreign and simpler, two big strikes.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#55

Post by boucher » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:03 PM UTC

pchristensen wrote: post #52

boucher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, I don't think you can call any of those languages failures. Certainly not PHP, Python, or Ruby. I would venture to guess that all three are more commonly used than Lisp.

Failure in the Grahammian sense of being a dead-end. "I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language." - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

Though I disagree with most of the conclusions in that essay, and in particular the expectation that Lisp (or a direct descendant) is going to be the language of the future, I still think it's way too early to call the above languages failures, even in the "Grahammiam" sense.

Python and Ruby especially are growing in popularity, and I think it's awfully premature to consider them evolutionary dead ends at this stage in the game.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#56

Post by pchristensen » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:03 PM UTC

I wrote about this a while back (http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-the-golden-ag...)

Basically, there are two Lisp eras - the big AI era and the new pg/Open Source era. The recent renewal of interest in programming languages, as well as publicity by writers like pg, Yegge, Raganwald, etc, have led more people to become interested in Lisp, but it's on an informal, person-by-person basis. Some of these people (like me) have chosen to stick with it and new Lisp communities have formed by gradual accretion. But this process has started later and been more distributed than other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl).

In researching things and trying to figure out Lisp setup problems, I've noticed that there are fewer technical "How do I ..." questions now than a couple years ago but more usage questions. The technical problems are being solved and now more stuff "just works" - not completely but much more than in the recent past. I've noticed this for CLisp, SBCL, ASDF, and other tools. There's more documentation, more tutorials, etc. Now there are a couple young web frameworks (UCW, Weblocks), generally accepted libraries for common tasks, etc. Lisp is growing in popularity and is maybe 1-2 years away from being "tasteable" - ie you can try it out without a big hassle and a research project. I think that will be an inflection point, after which growth will come much faster.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#57

Post by stevecooperorg » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:06 PM UTC

mattjones wrote: post #22

"Unpopular" needs to be further qualified. Rather than ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular?", ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular for X?". Lisp is actually reasonably popular for some things, and it's those things to which existing dialects are best adapted. Being well adapted to Y often means not being especially well adapted to X, even if it's for subtle reasons. It's like asking, "Why are Arctic foxes ( Alopex lagopus ) not very…

OK, I'll bite;

    (mapcar #'why-is-lisp-unpopular? 
            (list system-administration
                  enterprise-applications
                  web-applications
                  embedded-software
                  mobile-phone-apps
                  blogging-software
                  compiler-writing
                  configuration-files))

;)

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#58

Post by stevecooperorg » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:10 PM UTC

phr wrote: post #42

Actually, that little yellow thing looks to me like a large boom lift. Note the cage at the front, away from us. For cleaning bird droppings off the array elements?

yeah. It's the garbage collector.

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#59

Post by shiranaihito » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:17 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #36

gordianknot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Lisp a "smart" language?

Metaprogramming capabilities. Most people seem to prefer keyboard macros or cut-n-paste to actually writing language-level macros. Anyway, Lisp (and many other languages) gives you a lot of tools to make programming more thinking-intensive and less typing-intensive. Since typing is easy and thinking is hard, it follows that many people will prefer the language that makes you type. JMHO.

Good point!

Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular

#60

Post by Hexstream » Thu, Apr 03, 2008, 6:22 PM UTC

stevecooperorg wrote: post #31

brlewis wrote: post #2

There are many hypotheses out there that Lisp lacks popularity for this or that flaw in the language or in the community. The problem with these hypotheses is that you can point to similar or bigger flaws in languages that have grown popular. If a language has good qualities, people will figure out ways around the problems. My hypothesis is that Lisp is unpopular for the exact same reason some of us love it: concise…

I really don't find that lisp, at least common lisp, is particularly concise. Consider lambda functions, one of those things that lisp is particularly praised for; common lisp: (lambda (x) (+ x 1)) C#3 : x=> x + 1 ruby : { |x| x + 1 } python : lambda x: x + 1 Haskell : \x -> x + 1 Just in terms of character count, CL is the longest of the lot. No, the problem with trying to get a lisp under your belt has alredy been…

"I've tried really hard to learn lisp, and it turns out that actually, while there may be some platonic lisp that IS great, actually programming common lisp, now, is a massive effort in struggling in the dark."

The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P

You usually get rewards proportional to the effort... I don't think lisp is beyond anyone's reach if they work faithfully on gaining proficiency in it for 3 months, maximum. 3 months is nothing if it makes you a much better programmer, and/or you get to use this awesome language.

I think it's important to first research lisp's benefits. Of course you won't be willing to spend the necessary efforts if you're not convinced... I know I just couldn't resist the appeal of closures, macros, CLOS (multiple inheritence, multimethods, class redefinitions) the condition system (restarts in particular), generalized variables and a bunch of other fun stuff.