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A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

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Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#11

Post by lispm »

dleslie wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

CMUCL was his baby and he was responsible for that. But it addressed UNIX systems. Those usually had not x86 processors at that time and Windows was not very interesting as a platform then.

Windows (and Macs) were never a good place for free Lisps for, since the support of those on proprietary platforms was costly (in terms of knowhow, time and money) and there was no vendor support. Users on those platforms usually expect support for the vendor libraries AND full GUI support. Microsoft and Apple always pushed their own development tools&languages (Visual Basic, C, C++ and Pascal, C/C++, Objective-C, Swift). The Lisp systems used on Windows and Mac were mostly commercial, since they had GUI and platform support. MCL on the Mac and on Windows then Golden Common Lisp, Allegro CL, ...

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#13

Post by lispm »

pfdietz wrote: post #9
dleslie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

Indeed. It took a while for a good free Common Lisp to become available. Arguably this wasn't until SBCL (initial release, December 1999).

And even that still lacks basic Windows integration.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#14

Post by nonrandomstring »

lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

It is sad. But I feel some of the sibling comments about availability are correct. My love of Lisp went unrequited for may years. Faffing around with Steel Bank and Common Lisp environments that drove me crazy, when I could just type

cc myprog.c

and get stuff done (fast but unsafely)

The Scheme we had at college (which ran on some Sun machines IIRC) just wasn't available in the wild once I left school.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#15

Post by bcrosby95 »

dleslie wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

I transferred from community college to a CSU in the early '00s. Our high school was using Pascal, the community college I went into was using C++, and the CSU I eventually transferred into recently transitioned to Java, and they were using C++ before then.

When we used C++, the education version of Visual Studio was about the price of a text book - so not very expensive considering you would use it across many classes.

I assume the schools followed industry rather than the other way around. But thinking about it, Java had made its way into at least one CSU, as the primary language, about 3-4 years after its 1.0 release date. That is amazingly fast.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#16

Post by zabzonk »

dleslie wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

agree. this has also been the problem fore smalltalk. before things like scratch and pharo came along, commercial smalltalk licences were eye-wateringly expensive.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#17

Post by rjsw »

lispm wrote: post #11
dleslie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

CMUCL was his baby and he was responsible for that. But it addressed UNIX systems. Those usually had not x86 processors at that time and Windows was not very interesting as a platform then. Windows (and Macs) were never a good place for free Lisps for, since the support of those on proprietary platforms was costly (in terms of knowhow, time and money) and there was no vendor support. Users on those platforms usually…

CMUCL could have been ported to x86 earlier, I was running UNIX on a 386 in 1987 but only had AKCL for it. I was the first beta-tester for CMUCL on FreeBSD in 1996.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#18

Post by rileyphone »

dleslie wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

Similar forces hampered the adoption of Smalltalk in the 90s as well [0]. Charging per-seat licenses to use programming languages almost never works, introducing friction that counters needed network effects, especially when prospective users can download a perfectly viable (if not much worse) alternative for free. Sure, there are a few systems bitterly hanging on to this business model - Lispworks, Cincom, Mathematica - but it's clear they are surviving in spite of it.

0. https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-o...

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#19

Post by fhd2 »

I find this part the most interesting:

"Since then, my focus has been on AI research, and part of that involves the design of planning systems that (maybe) can eliminate the need for most programming. You tell them what you want, as you might describe it to a smart grad student, they maybe ask some clarification questions, and then they go do it. That only works if they know enough about the world and have enough "common sense" to avoid blunders."

I wonder what he's working on to enable that kind of environment. Thinking about how most of the programming I do (in high level languages) comes down to starting with a pretty rough idea and iterating on the idea while learning more about what's feasible / effective, typically refining what it is I'm building rather fluidly. I rarely know exactly what to build upfront, nor do the CEOs, product managers, designers or sales people I've worked with so far. I think this feed back loop goes far beyond "asking a few clarifying questions".

Maybe the kind of task a professor would give to a grad student is entirely different from that kind of typical industry work?

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#20

Post by nerdponx »

comfypotato wrote: post #4

He certainly implies that he thinks Common Lisp (and maybe Dylan) would have been as popular as Java is today if the lottery had played out differently. I wonder if anyone else feels this way. The programming world would be a different place. I can’t help but fantasize about how incredible eMacs would be by now if that had been the case. (Not that it isn’t already incredible.)

I think S-expressions are fundamentally too difficult to work with, without good editor support, to make Lisp anything other than a niche power tool for the highly motivated. I love CL, Scheme, Clojure, Janet, Fennel, etc. but I don't blame anyone for finding them inaccessible.

I think Python, JavaScript, and Go have caught on for somewhat similar reasons, compared to Java and C#: they are easier to get started with, and you can still scale them up to fairly large applications.

On the other hand, I think S-expressions are a sadly underexplored format for data serialization and storage.

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