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In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

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Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#61

Post by toyg »

mepian wrote: post #39
toyg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you give LISP a role, one also has to consider that it was a time when the most popular languages (C++, early Java, Perl) were pretty low-level and not at all web-friendly or async-friendly. LISP could bridge that gap because it makes it very easy to build DSLs and "go up" in abstraction with minimal fuss. If you start with Python or Ruby and their popular frameworks, these days, most of that work is already…

Python already existed at that time for 4 years, at least.

Python didn't even have lambda/map/filter/reduce until '94.

Lisp was already Lisp.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#62

Post by toyg »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #42
toyg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you give LISP a role, one also has to consider that it was a time when the most popular languages (C++, early Java, Perl) were pretty low-level and not at all web-friendly or async-friendly. LISP could bridge that gap because it makes it very easy to build DSLs and "go up" in abstraction with minimal fuss. If you start with Python or Ruby and their popular frameworks, these days, most of that work is already…

Lisp was a lot less web friendly then than it is now, especially compared to those languages.

In primitives, yes; but that's not the point with Lisp, whereas it is for those alternatives.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#63

Post by adriftincode »

klez wrote: post #57
adriftincode wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people tag the year on articles? I feel like hackers cling to the “if it’s not new, it’s not worthy” paradigm. Update: Thanks for all the replies, makes sense. Why downvote an honest question?

I didn't downvote but I don't think you're being downvoted for asking an honest question, but mostly because > I feel like hackers cling to the “if it’s not new, it’s not worthy” paradigm. is incorrect and reeks of an accusation of elitism which is not fair in this case.

I can see how it may have come off that way. It was my first thought as I’ve seen people get pretty exited about the new—rather than the old. Some thoughts are better kept to the self.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#64

Post by xrd »

I wrote a book for O'Reilly (https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/) and I only say that because what I'll say next is controversial.

First, there must be a huge market for technical books that don't appeal to Lisp fanatics. There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes, which are very technical, like those dealing with Lisp.

Two, and this is what is controversial: O'Reilly as a publisher is unable to offer those types of books and misses out on those types of customers.

I don't know how they marketed my book, honestly. I intended that it would speak to the beginner programmer by offering up chapters that introduced a new programming language in each chapter. I hoped people who weren't technology experts would find a gentle path into technology with my book. But I don't think it resonated, maybe that speaks to the quality of the book, but maybe not.

Less than 1% of the people in the world are software developers. Are the people fascinated by Lisp less than 1% of that? But, excluding say the Luddite population, let's say 90% of the rest of the people in the modern world do want to learn about technology and how to play with it, and I'm not sure O'Reilly knows how to reach them. O'Reilly is full of some of the smartest people in the tech community, but I'm not sure the empathy for beginners is there and that's hindering them as a publisher.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#65

Post by mark_l_watson »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #42
toyg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you give LISP a role, one also has to consider that it was a time when the most popular languages (C++, early Java, Perl) were pretty low-level and not at all web-friendly or async-friendly. LISP could bridge that gap because it makes it very easy to build DSLs and "go up" in abstraction with minimal fuss. If you start with Python or Ruby and their popular frameworks, these days, most of that work is already…

Lisp was a lot less web friendly then than it is now, especially compared to those languages.

When Alexis Ohanian gave a talk at Google in 2013 I asked him afterwards about converting Reddit from Common Lisp to Python. He said the Common Lisp version crashed too often. He even made a funny comment about this when he autographed Without Their Permission for me.

I agree with you, the web apps in CL story is much better now. I am biased, now that I am mostly retired most of my fun side projects are in CL (with Haskell being a close second).

I really don’t care what languages other people choose to use but using CL makes me happy and I enjoy reading about other people doing good things in CL.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#66

Post by cheez »

s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Lisp the language has "code as data" which other languages are just catching up on. Basically, you can generate code using formal code, not a pre-processor

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#67

Post by mark_l_watson »

mepian wrote: post #37
Annatar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.

SBCL is open source, so you are free to improve the support for Solaris.

Also, the SBCL maintainers can be hired for custom help or support - one of my customers did this, with good results.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#69

Post by rjsw »

Annatar wrote: post #23
s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Because it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.

SBCL works fine on BSD variants, and the project makes submitting patches easy enough.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#70

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

Independently of the connection between PG and Lisp, many engineers are interested in Lisp because it's one of the simplest programming languages that is closely connected to the Lambda calculus.

E.g. https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/lambda/lisp.html

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