So I guess we’re just not gonna talk about that teaser for that AI that says we don’t need to program anymore? Sounds like a symbolic local version of GPT-3
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
#62> 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 sh…
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Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#63The early LISP crowd just didn't get the concept of making a product. The idea that eventually you generate an executable and leave the development environment behind was totally alien. I used Berkeley's Franz LISP in my years at the aerospace company. That was a compiler which generated .o files. So they were close to being able to do this.
But you didn't link the .o files; you had to load them into the development environment to run them. Compiling was just an optimization. I asked the Franz LISP devs why they didn't provide a runtime you could just link in, yielding a releaseable executable program without all the baggage for breaking and debugging. This was a totally alien concept to them.
INTERLISP and Symbolics were even worse - you were always in the development environment and couldn't get anything out except a saved state dump.
Eventually the LISP crowd got it and started generating executables, but it was too late by then.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#64> 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 sh…
counterexamples: python ruby perl clojure C C++
C++ had a whole host of compilers and tooling/IDEs pushed by large private companies (Microsoft, Borland, Intel). I think that somewhat qualifies as institutional backing of another sort.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#65Earlier 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 syntactic consistency is at the same time its downfall: everything looks the same. (Functional languages like Haskell have a similar problem.) It’s more accommodating to human cognition if at least some part of the complexity and diversity of conceptual constructs in programming is represented in the syntax, meaning a certain range of different syntactic constructs that humans can attach meaning to. There is a sweet spot in syntactic diversity that matches the middle of the bell curve across programmers of how human cognition can absorb code. And that sweet spot isn’t on the more “spartan” side where Lisp resides. A different extreme are the more “cryptic” languages like APL and descendants. In a certain way, everything looks the same in those as well.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#66He 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.)
Sun Microsystems poured millions of dollars into marketing Java. During the dotcom bust billboards, posters, magazine ads, and online ads where common. This massively accelerated it's adoption curve and built a valuable trademark which would be part of the reason Oracle paid $7 billion to buy it.
This is all true, and it should be noted that at the time of its release in mid 90s, Java was an incredibly fun toy to play with and adoption was enthusiastic, and at least in my case, it was an immediate decision to say goodbye to C++ ("forever" /g) and adopt Java, which also turned out to be a good bet in terms of jobs.
Let's also note that to this day I (or any Java professional) can go and earn a living writing Java and not feel like I'm writing COBOL for a mainframe modulo the Spring framework (which I have avoided, to date.)
SMI did not merely pour money in marketing Java. A lot of loving care by very competent software engineers, some of the best, went into creating Java and its virtual machine. The sweet spot of this language is phenomenally large, imo as an s/e, and accessible to an equally large subset of the programming community (even if they hate it, they can do it), from IT low end to investment banks and up to academic people doing super cool stuff like adding fibers to Java (Kilim). Same story holds for performance. Only on the GUI front did Java drop the ball.
Java is, entirely on its technical merits and utility record to date, one of the most practically effective languages created. Thank you Sun Microsystems.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#67Earlier 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…
If this were the case, then explain StandardML which is vastly superior to Java and it's relatives in every conceivable way outside of a big corporation to push it. Even today, a large company like google would rather spend time with an inferior language like Go than work with SML.
Available libraries are another factor. C and C++ can directly call all OS functions. Java very early had an extensive runtime library supporting networking, GUI programming, multithreading, collection classes, localization, date/time, etc.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#68The early LISP crowd just didn't get the concept of making a product. The idea that eventually you generate an executable and leave the development environment behind was totally alien. I used Berkeley's Franz LISP in my years at the aerospace company. That was a compiler which generated .o files. So they were close to being able to do this. But you didn't link the .o files; you had to load them into the development…
Franz Lisp could generate executables from the beginning, the debugging features didn't add much to the size.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#69He 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.)
Honestly it would have turned into something like Java if it had become popular in the industry. OOP and functional programming are really just different ways to encapsulate data and control dispatch. They don't change the fundamental nature of the work. Ultimately what happened to Java was the same thing that would have happened to any other dominant language that the industry uses to build heavy duty enterprise sof…
Reading this, it feels like you have never touched Common Lisp.
It's not a functional programming language. It's an object-oriented imperative language.
Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman
#70In the 80's and 90's Common Lisp compilers and editors were insanely expensive. The hardware was too, not even sure if those early implementations ran on x86... That's why they didn't take off. Easy to look back with rose coloured lenses now that we've had free implementations for awhile... Meanwhile C/C++, Pascal and Java were all accessible and cheap if not free...
Other languages like Smalltalk and Ada suffered from this as well.