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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

#121

Post by gnufx »

wrp wrote: post #87
nerdponx wrote: post #20

Earlier 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,…

Lisp syntax is an extreme impediment to uptake. Consider what happened to Lisp-Stat. It was a really slick package, but people immediately dropped it when R became available. Lisp defenders like to think that R won out because of better libraries, performance, or some such. The truth is that the stampede began while R was still in a rough state, people were so eager to get away from Lisp.

Is it clear people wanted to get away from Lisp rather than use a more-or-less clone of S? (One of R's originators did propose moving back to a Lisp base [1], though part of the justification was HPC, which is now at least partially covered [2].) However, much as I like Lisp, I do want a mixfix syntax for interactive use like R, but something CGOL-ish is easy enough; I don't remember xlisp-stat having something like that.

1. https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-20...

2. https://pbdr.org

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

#122

Post by dleslie »

lispm wrote: post #104
rileyphone wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Mathemati…

Again the same: now there are good free Smalltalk implementations, and their adoption is not great. There are also other factors than price.

Scratch 1.x and 2.x were written in Smalltalk, FWIW.

But IMHO the "your whole dev environment is your shipped application" is too unappealing to catch on.

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

#123

Post by dleslie »

hajile wrote: post #59
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…

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.

Was there an SML implementation available for free on DOS and Windows in the 90s?

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

#124

Post by pjmlp »

Narishma wrote: post #70
Mikeb85 wrote: post #24

In 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.

What impacted Smalltalk, was its biggest backer (IBM), deciding to pivot into Java, porting their flagship IDE (Visual Age) into Eclipse, dropping OS/2 (where Smalltalk had a role similar to VB/Delphi and later .NET), and dropping Smalltalk consulting altoghether.

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

#125

Post by pjmlp »

Oreb wrote: post #98
musicale wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I never used Dylan, but isn’t Julia kind of similar, as a Lisp with multiple dispatch and a main-stream syntax?

In high level yes, however Dylan was designed as systems programming language, so it also enjoys AOT compilation and low level stuff that Julia currently isn't able to.

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

#126

Post by pjmlp »

eternalban wrote: post #66
ozten wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 J…

Also thank you Oracle for buying Sun, when no one else cared about it, for improving Java beyond version 6, bringing MaximeVM out of Sun Labs research into GraalVM research labs, integrating JRockit JIT caching and VM monitoring into OpenJDK, and caring about AOT compilation when Sun left it for commercial 3rd party vendors.

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

#127

Post by pjmlp »

rileyphone wrote: post #18
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…

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, Mathemati…

As I wrote in another thread, IBM abandoning Smalltalk for Java was the biggest blow, in a way Smalltalk was IBM's .NET to put in more modern terms, used for their IDEs (Visual Age), OS/2 RAD development and 4GL like language across all their enterprise offerings.

Until the day Java came, and they pivoted everything into Java.

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

#128

Post by pjmlp »

taeric wrote: post #45
skissane wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hardly anyone cared about GCC in those days, most compilers were still commercial.

In fact, GCC only started to matter to UNIX folks, because Sun introduced the concept of user and developer UNIX workloads, and all UNIX vendors followed along, making the UNIX development tools into an additional package one had to buy.

Thus the race to improve GCC started.

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

#129

Post by pjmlp »

dleslie wrote: post #123
hajile wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was there an SML implementation available for free on DOS and Windows in the 90s?

Kind of, Caml Light, Objective Caml's predecessor, was available.

That was my introduction to ML universe.

It wasn't SML, but close enough.

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

#130

Post by kazinator »

bambataa wrote: post #117
Jtsummers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slime did that? Slime doesn't take over the editor that much (it shouldn't prevent you from typing parentheses, I've used it for 16 years or so and never experienced anything like that). Was it paredit or another editor mode?

Sorry you’re right, it would have been Paredit. I guess my point is that syntax that works very well with a correctly configured editor used by someone who knows what they’re doing is going to have a higher barrier to entry than a language that can be easily edited in Notepad.

I don't know of any language that can be easily edited in Notepad.

Not even English.

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