Good interview. When I think of Scott Fahlman, I think of his nicely designed and implemented backdrop neural network library for Common Lisp.
Do you have a link to it? Thank you
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
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses. Many languages require them in ad-hoc ways to groups expressions. For S-expressions, you give up some mild convenience and looks for extremely consistent semantics.
The syntax is consistent, I don't know about the semantics. The trade-off is that it becomes more difficult to glance at a piece of code and visually distinguish what's what.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. You could get GCC for free before Java 1.0 was released. My personal introduction to GCC was Walnut Creek's Hobbes OS/2 CD-ROM from 1994, the EMX port. Paid for the CD-ROM, but we could have downloaded it for free if we had Internet access. EMX did DOS too, and DJGPP was also available at the same time (and ended up overtaking EMX…
Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to get Java to people.
> Not sure how this is a counter point?
GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing.
So lack of massive corporate backing is insufficient as an explanation of Common Lisp's lack of free availability (on then-mainstream platforms) circa 1995.
I think the real explanation is, at that point, the Common Lisp community mostly didn't get why it was important. And by the time they got it, it was too late.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to get Java to people.
> > It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. It was GCC being free, and on DOS thanks to djgpp, that made it successful; and it didn't need corporate megabucks to do it.
I think you are talking past me, though. My claim is that it took massive corporate bucks for Java to get inroads. Specifically because it was competing with some free options.
Common lisp had nothing like that. Nor did Ada. Or... really, any other language? Microsoft did a pretty heavy push with C# and the general .NET ecosystem. Though, even they had to resort to destroying a lot if the VBScript world that had proliferated quite heavily by just being available on tools that folks otherwise had.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to get Java to people.
> Not sure how this is a counter point? GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. So lack of massive corporate backing is insufficient as an explanation of Common Lisp's lack of free availability (on then-mainstream platforms) circa 1995. I think the real explanation is, at that point, the Common Lisp community mostly didn't get why it was important. And by the time they got it, it was too…
GCC being freely available is by far the exception, historically. Such that I don't really get your point. Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free?
And, as I said in a sibling thread, my assertion is that it took massive corporate spending for Sun to get inroads with Java. In large because they were competing with GCC.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses. Many languages require them in ad-hoc ways to groups expressions. For S-expressions, you give up some mild convenience and looks for extremely consistent semantics.
> I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses A common refrain from Lisp family language enthusiasts. (Personally I prefer Smalltalk-style "conversational" syntax to Lisp-style or C-style syntax, yet it's similarly unpopular.) For better or for worse, the vast majority of programmers seem to have voted with their feet for C-style syntax (C/C++/Java/JavaScript/etc.) and its variants (Python). In a…
(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#47Earlier 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).
(Free) LISPs on Linux today look a bit rough, is there any implementation that turns Linux into something that has the look and feel of a LISP machine?
Parentheses aside, don't expect people to pick up a language if all they can see is a REPL where the only edit operation that works is DEL(ete), at a time when all other languages have graphical IDEs with syntax coloring, context-sensitive help, single-step debugging etc. (and no, I don't mean Emacs).
edit: screen shot to support the argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Bank_Common_Lisp#/media/...
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. It was GCC being free, and on DOS thanks to djgpp, that made it successful; and it didn't need corporate megabucks to do it.
I think you are talking past me, though. My claim is that it took massive corporate bucks for Java to get inroads. Specifically because it was competing with some free options. Common lisp had nothing like that. Nor did Ada. Or... really, any other language? Microsoft did a pretty heavy push with C# and the general .NET ecosystem. Though, even they had to resort to destroying a lot if the VBScript world that had prol…
Java was free, too; and at the time, djgpp was effectively the only free c++ toolchain on DOS and Windows.
Common Lisp wasn't even available to DOS and Windows users, let alone free or corporately backed. Even now every single free common lisp has substandard or outright broken Windows support.
Common Lisp didn't bother to show up to the party. That's the first problem; it was priced terribly, when it did become usefully available.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the parent comment is alluding to the notion that the very entry level programmer enjoys being able to use notepad. That is to say the initial barrier of eMacs is just too much. Obviously worth it in the long run though.
“eMacs” is the wrong capitalization. It’s “Emacs”.
M-c would fix that I believe.
My autocorrect has been doing that for some reason and I assumed there was logic to it. Your comment sent me on a dive that proved my intuition woefully incorrect.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#50> programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. For any given project, the best programming language to use is the one everyone else is using for that kind of programming at that time. It doesn't have to be the language that is best or most beautiful, and it hardly ever is. As long as the currently-dominant language is adequate to the task without TOO many infuriating shortcomings, just use it.
Unexpected advice coming from one of Common Lisp's creators. He goes on to talk about how languages usually become popular because they have the backing of some large company. Things haven't really changed. Rust and Golang both at least had some sort of backing company to get them started.