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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?

#51

Post by jll29 »

C does what I say but not always what I mean.

C++ is too complicated to even bother, and looks a completely different language every five years; I have yet to meet anyone that knows its syntax fully (C++ compilers included). Writing C/C++ means spending your time managing memory and then debugging memory management errors rather than thinking about the problem domain.

Python is very slow and has horrible package management.

Rust compiles slowly and the borrow checker takes a long time getting used to.

Java is bloated and Oracle-proprietary.

No version of Julia could even compile the example of the Julia book I bought, nor some of its own tutoials.

Perl is write-only.

...and CommonLISP? I know important and successful systems have used it in the past, but haven't heard anyone using it for anything I needed recently (but that could be due to my area, search engines, natural language processing and machine learning, where Python libraries - written in C++ to be fast enough - dominate the research frontier).

LISPs incl. CommonLISP and esp. Scheme are elegant, minimalist (Scheme in particular) and lack powerful IDEs and library support (at least since LISP machines disappeared), and excess parentheses make for a write-only experience, especially if you have to read the code of others (your own code may make good use of functional abstraction).

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

#52

Post by edflsafoiewq »

Karellen wrote: post #42
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 ),…

> 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 doe…

A Python list is an ArrayList/vector, not a linked list. CL lists are linked lists of cons cells.

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

#53

Post by LeoPanthera »

Karellen wrote: post #42
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 ),…

> 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 doe…

I love Python's list comprehensions. When I first discovered them I had a kind of "mind blown" moment. They look like this, for anyone who doesn't know:

  squared_div_by_3 = [i**2 for i in range(10) if i % 3 == 0]
Without using a list comprehension, this is equivalent to:

  squared_div_by_3 = []
  for i in range(10):
      if i % 3 == 0:
          squared_div_by_3.append(i**2)

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

codr7 wrote: post #17
Lyngbakr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you can put your finger on exactly why you find it fun? (While I've never used CL, I do use Clojure and similarly find it huge amounts of fun.)

Clojure is a different beast, not better or worse, just different. CL doesn't have opinions, it's a toolbox.

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by samatman »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #52
Karellen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doe…

A Python list is an ArrayList/vector, not a linked list. CL lists are linked lists of cons cells.

Correct. There's no such thing as a python a-list, or p-list, and they can't share structure. There's overlap between programming in Python with lists, and programming in Lisp with lists, but not as much as it appears.

In idiomatic Lisp, it's rather common to search a list for a value, cdr it, and cons that cdr to the collection you're building up. Python has nothing like that, because what I said makes no sense in terms of Python lists.

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

#56

Post by samatman »

beanjuiceII wrote: post #9
kentrado wrote: post #4

I love programming in common lisp. It has made programming fun again. I don't know if that makes me a lisp person. I just know it makes programming fun for me.

I love programming in blah. It has made programming fun again. I don't know if that makes me a blah person. I just know it makes programming fun for me.

This sort of conduct isn't welcome here.

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

#57

Post by erik_seaberg »

pfdietz wrote: post #3

Back in the day, it required machines that were more powerful than what C programs could run on. By the time machines caught up and Common Lisp was standardized it was too late.

Lisp was sort of a testbed for extravagantly expensive features, many of which (not all) became table stakes for newer languages as they got better at writing compilers for much bigger, faster computers.

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

#59

Post by readthenotes1 »

(I once) (worked at a company) (that made (Lisp) machines) and (sold them internally (until the factory managers (wised up) and said (the programmers (are great) (at creating (a functional prototype) but (invariably left for higher pay elsewhere (before completing the job) and (try were always worse off))))

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

#60

Post by tcmart14 »

linguae wrote: post #50
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…

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 m…

I'm not sure if Rust is a good comparison though. Rust is a lot closer to C, it is a language influenced by C, and current popular programming languages tend to also be influenced by C. So while there is a lot different with Rust, a lot of knowledge from, lets say, a C developer can carry over.

Say your a C developer, or C++ developer and I am a Rust developer trying to sell you on Rust. You have to learn a new language. No way around it. Even though people may have problems with this statement, at a high level it is close enough, I can sell you on Rust probably by saying, 'it C/C++ with better (subjective) or more modern features and extra constraints (think borrow checker) to guarantee memory safety.' I would not be able to make that same argument with LISP.

The next question could be why this could be true, or more importantly, why are so many people using C-like languages. I'd probably place it on portability and UNIX from when C emerged. And LISP machines died.

In other words, I don't think it would be appropriate to try to draw a comparison between the two with the two of them in a vacuum. If LISP machines survived and were popular today, we could see Rust today having the same popularity of LISP today.

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