Lisp seems to be a language for individualists, which isn't a great way to build a community and beyond.
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?
#42It'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 ),…
> But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively,
Idiomatic python code uses lists extensively. In my (somewhat limited) experience, they're the default data structure to use for a lot of algorithms.
Slightly more accurately, a lot of stuff in python uses sequences extensively, which are implemented by a number of types - but the default sequence is a list. And strings are lists. Yeah, if a list doesn't cut it then try sets or tuples or generators or coroutines or something else that implements a sequence. But for your initial prototype? List.
And python's pretty popular.
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#43Paraphrasing 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 sai…
Afaik intel compilers are based on llvm nowadays
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#44A plausible reason: because no big company is backing it with money.
This industry will mostly use whatever Google/Microsoft/Meta sponsors.
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#45For me it's the parentheses. I'm sorry, I know it sounds childish, but it's true.
Just look at this picture:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-programming-langua...
We call that "line noise".
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#46The same reason as why Esperanto is not the most popular spoken language. It's historical reasons and network effects.
No, it's difficult to read and understand. It's a parenthesis circus. For example -
https://github.com/dimitri/pgloader/blob/master/src/pgsql/pg...
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#47Package management kind of sucks, the ecosystem sucks, other languages continually improve but nobody will ever advance the CL standard. There is nothing compelling about the language to people who aren't already Lisp people.
it's paradoxical since lisp people weren't born this way, surely there was some appeal (beyond being influenced by teachings) ;)
I do think there are some traits like curiosity, open mindedness, and patience that make some people more susceptible to infection.
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#48The vast majority of people who want to create something that executes on a computer are not inclined to write in a language that more closely resembles parse trees than it does human language. To many, Lisp is nearly as inscrutable as an intentionally esoteric language.
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
SBCL has save-lisp-and-die. The binaries are big though. LispWorks will give you smaller binaries, but it costs money.
Re: Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
#50Because 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…
Rust requires people to learn how to adapt to Rust’s borrow checker, which can be challenging for programmers coming from other languages, yet this hasn’t stopped Rust’s rapid adoption in systems programming. In fact, Rust’s safety features are Rust’s selling point.
Of course, it helps that Rust came from Mozilla and that it’s used in Firefox. Other than Grammarly and some internal Google products, I don’t know any modern-day high-profile projects written in Common Lisp. What would help bolster Common Lisp would be a high-profile project that would be much more difficult to implement in other languages.