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Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

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Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#21

Post by IshKebab »

samatman wrote: post #7

It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…

I disagree. I have no problem with lists obsession in other languages like OCaml.

The parentheses are just too much. I get how elegant and unambiguous they are for computers but I am not a computer. It's like RPN. It's elegant and easy for code to parse and unambiguous and all these nice things.... except it isn't easy for me to parse.

Compilers are perfectly capable of compiling readable code like Rust so I don't see why I should have to do the tedious work of figuring out all the parentheses manually.

Lisp is like a really great IR. But I don't want to program in an IR.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#22

Post by JohnFen »

thot_experiment wrote: post #14

Because most programming is done by people trying to do a job and it requires broad tooling support and familiarity, LISP is a language that has neither. LISP, (similarly to Haskell) requires you to bend your mind and pay an upfront mental cost in order to access it's benefits, which are that everything is equally easy to describe. No construct in LISP feels like it requires you to bend the language in an awful way b…

I didn't find Lisp to be particularly costly in terms of mental energy to become competent in. Rust, however, was a heavy lift.

Perhaps different people are inherently more or less compatible with different languages?

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#23

Post by edflsafoiewq »

patrickmay wrote: post #16
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #5

Essentially all the Lisp features except for s-expression syntax and attendant macros have been adopted by popular mainstream languages. CL has already given everything it had to give.

The Common Lisp condition system is far superior to any alternative in any other language.

Not sure about that, but it's true it hasn't been adopted. There's also some CLOS stuff you can't find in modern languages.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#25

Post by JohnFen »

IshKebab wrote: post #21
samatman wrote: post #7

It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…

I disagree. I have no problem with lists obsession in other languages like OCaml. The parentheses are just too much. I get how elegant and unambiguous they are for computers but I am not a computer. It's like RPN. It's elegant and easy for code to parse and unambiguous and all these nice things.... except it isn't easy for me to parse. Compilers are perfectly capable of compiling readable code like Rust so I don't se…

> It's like RPN

That's genuinely fascinating for me, because I find postfix notation to be more intuitive and easy to parse than infix notation.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#26

Post by thot_experiment »

agumonkey wrote: post #18
thot_experiment wrote: post #14

Because most programming is done by people trying to do a job and it requires broad tooling support and familiarity, LISP is a language that has neither. LISP, (similarly to Haskell) requires you to bend your mind and pay an upfront mental cost in order to access it's benefits, which are that everything is equally easy to describe. No construct in LISP feels like it requires you to bend the language in an awful way b…

the upfront mental cost debate is still going, a few people tried teachings lisps as first languages and people didn't struggle i personally cried a few tears when learning java, whereas the weird drscheme class made me all calm and happy programming also blends a few layers into one, and some people are operating at one (line by line modification of data), some want generic infinite freedom[0], you can rapidly see w…

Yeah that's fair, it also came naturally to me but anecdotally I've found a lot of people struggle with it, especially those who came up through a "get shit done first" type python or java pipeline in a traditional institution or bootcamp rather than having a true CS background.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#28

Post by taeric »

Paraphrasing the point at the end, there is no company that has the financial incentives to promote it. The companies that do have financial interests in CL are ironically not incentivized to promote the free ecosystem around it. For the same reason that commercial C compilers are not really a thing anymore.

This is, of course, a simplified view of things. For one, I think Intel still pushes a compiler some. That said, I think it is valid enough, in that Intel isn't pushing the compiler for the sake of the language it compiles, but to push some optimizations that they excel at.

There is a question of how explanatory this is. I think it is fairly accurate to say that the marketing and general outreach for many of the successful languages today helped build on their popularity to the point that we know them today. It does not explain the seed of any success, though.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#29

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

thot_experiment wrote: post #14

Because most programming is done by people trying to do a job and it requires broad tooling support and familiarity, LISP is a language that has neither. LISP, (similarly to Haskell) requires you to bend your mind and pay an upfront mental cost in order to access it's benefits, which are that everything is equally easy to describe. No construct in LISP feels like it requires you to bend the language in an awful way b…

When I learned emacs lisp back in the mid-80s, I didn't find any requirement to bend my mind or pay any upfront cost. It was a little different from C (and BASIC), certainly, but once I grasped a few basic concepts, it felt extremely elegant and very well suited to the task(s) to which I was putting it.

More recently, I've felt that way about Python, and about a few chunks of my favorite blobs of self-written C++.

Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

#30

Post by WillAdams »

agumonkey wrote: post #18
thot_experiment wrote: post #14

Because most programming is done by people trying to do a job and it requires broad tooling support and familiarity, LISP is a language that has neither. LISP, (similarly to Haskell) requires you to bend your mind and pay an upfront mental cost in order to access it's benefits, which are that everything is equally easy to describe. No construct in LISP feels like it requires you to bend the language in an awful way b…

the upfront mental cost debate is still going, a few people tried teachings lisps as first languages and people didn't struggle i personally cried a few tears when learning java, whereas the weird drscheme class made me all calm and happy programming also blends a few layers into one, and some people are operating at one (line by line modification of data), some want generic infinite freedom[0], you can rapidly see w…

For my comparative programming class in college, I was the only person who got all the Lisp assignments done on time and correctly (it helped that I was deeply into TeX at the time), so there is definitely a mind-frame to be in, and some sort of hurdle which a fair percentage of folks find difficult.

One big problem w/ Lisp is that it is so difficult to distribute programs written using it --- I'd give a lot for the ability to compile to a stand-alone program which could then be distributed.

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