Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

daninus14.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 339 posts

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

#81

Post by Animats »

I've written in Common LISP. Here's my port of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover to CLisp.[1] I've used original INTERLISP. I've used a Symbolics LISP machine. I once did a lot of work in Franz LISP.[2] And I'm partially responsible for AutoCAD going with AutoLISP as a scripting language. I've even taken a class from John McCarthy himself, at Stanford.

All that was decades ago. I haven't written a new program in LISP in decades. (In later years Python, Go, Rust, C++, and when forced, JavaScript.)

* Early thinking was that programs needed to be able to modify themselves. This turned out to be a niche feature. It was a holdover from the early days of programming, where storing into the code was considered a normal activity. Von Neumann was into that. To index into an array, load instructions were modified in place. Once index registers were invented, that mostly became unnecessary. Languages can be too dynamic. You pay a price for that. Python suffers from the design feature that anything can store into anything at any time. This blocks most compile-time optimizations.

* Lists as a primitive are OK, but modifying lists all the time isn't what you really want. Most languages have settled on a useful set of collections today, and their implementations, especially hashes, are highly optimized. Python pretty much got this right, and other languages now use roughly Python's various collection types.

* Saving the entire state of the system, instead of having source files, was a really bad idea for anything that had more than one person working on it.

* The overly clever macro system makes code hard to maintain. (I tried to port [2] to Common LISP. Got about half way. It has the original Oppen-Nelson simplifier inside, the first of what's now called a SAT solver. Originally written in MACLISP (MIT's Project MAC, not Apple Macintosh), and ported to Franz LISP by Oppen and Nelson, it has too many clever macros that I wasn't able to completely figure out a decade ago.) This is a generic problem with macro systems, of course, which is why C deliberately had a weak macro system.

LISP is a blast from the path. It's fun for retro reasons, but things have moved on.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/nqthm

[2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/pasv/tree/master/src/CPC4

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

#82

Post by doug_durham »

munchler wrote: post #38
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 agree with you about the upfront costs. As a functional programming fan (F# in particular), I can’t deny that it sometimes feels like puzzle solving. Fun, but not easy at first. On the other hand, you can quickly throw together some crappy Python code to do the same thing, but you end up paying 10x the cost over the long run in debugging and rewriting. So my advice for people who care about the code they write is t…

Python != Crappy code. Lisp != good code. You can write crappy code in any language. My experience is that it is much less expensive to maintain Python in a team environment in the long run. People aren't tempted to create their own personal "domain specific languages" in Python. Lisp kind of encourages that.

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

#83

Post by tcmart14 »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #70
tcmart14 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langu…

I'd argue Lisps are worse today. They encourage a thing that's generally discouraged in C: macro programming and typedefs. You're coding in Lisp, but you're actually coding in your own dialect of Lisp, eventually, with lots of idiosyncratic code that's difficult to reason about. That doesn't scale well in collaborative environments, where many people are touching a vast codebase (which I don't think was really a thin…

That is the biggest problem I have with LISP which is why I think a lot of it is historical to some degree. I do like LISP to dabble in, but yea, there are tons of different dialects, it makes it harder to approach. Because while there is 'Common' LISP, there are implementations that can vary slightly between compilers, which compiler do you use? And some of the more popular compilers are sort of dead? There is SBCL, which does get some development, but not much I think? I don't think newer version of SBCL run on most of the BSDs? And yea, you also end up creating your own dialect in the process.

Which some of those same problems could have occurred in C at some point, but C eventually converged. I can be confident my fairly simple C programs will compile just fine whether I use GCC/Clang/TCC, etc. If LISP could have converged like C did, it could be a completely different story, I wonder.

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

#84

Post by tmtvl »

> what we really need is one person who will lead a main CL only conference

Well, if you're volunteering...

All joking aside, I'm not particularly bothered with the relative lack of popularity CL has, its force-multiplying powers make it easy for a relatively small community to create and maintain a decently sized ecosystem.

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

#85

Post by svachalek »

gumby wrote: post #75
murderfs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely easier to parse programatically, but IMO it's a nightmare to read as a human. e.g. compare these expressions: (x+y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2 x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + + I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind.

It's exactly how you would do the calculation if you ran it by hand, unlike the regular algebraic notation. I am flabbergasted that anyone uses the latter, especially as for most of the history of mathematics calculation was done by hand!

I don't "run" x 2 ^ by hand and I don't think anyone does. Some people find different notations more intuitive and that's fine but whether it's prefix postfix or infix, it's still an abstraction.

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

#86

Post by cladopa »

A lot have already been said about it:

+Lisp Lost the train of microcomputers. They were "toy machines" that needed low level programming like assembly or forth or later C to do anything remotely similar to what Mainframes could do.

+Common Lisp is a mess, a compromise, like Deutsch (a language created to take something out of every variant dialect), designed by committee language. Better (opinionated, created by a person) alternative Lisps exist, like Clojure.

+Lack of (affordable, easy to use) Visual tools to develop, like Visual Studio. No. Emacs is not easy to use for newbies. Visual structured editing for parenthesis have existed for decades now but those tools were not available for normal PC and even today are very expensive, as the market for them are the companies that bought the expensive Lisp machines in low volume.

+Lack of access to the C libraries. Do you want to use anything modern like "dear imgui", iOS libraries or whatever? Bad luck.

+Competition catch up. Other languages copied(badly) the Lisp ideas, lambdas and real macros, functional programming. IMHO they did it wrong, but they are good enough for most people, while not having the problems of CL, like being able to use the C libraries as python and Lua can.

+Other Lisp are working fine. Clojure for example can use the java libraries or even some versions the C Libraries.

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

#87

Post by tmp_eSGPhx »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #32

I started learning Lisp recently. The text I was reading said people complain about the parentheses and I see a number of people stating that here. But that is not a problem when you have an editor that understands lisp and keeps track of all that for you. Just focus on the code and the editor will take care of the parentheses for you.

Agreed. At least you can see the parenthesis.

and seriously, what is the mental difference between say (print 'hello') and print('hello'), for me the first is easier. They both have the same number of parenthesis, but in the first I can see all the operations that go together.

Hating python every time I use it. Python is lies all the way down. "You don't need curly braces or anything to mark your code blocks, only indentation"... until you want a multi-line item, in which case you, well, wrap it in parenthesis.

foo = ("a very" "long" "string")

is valid python, and so is foo = ("a very", "long", "string")

but they give different results. vs (cat "a very" "long" "srtring")

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

#88

Post by Zak »

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…

> I don't see why I should have to do the tedious work of figuring out all the parentheses manually.

I think most people who write a lot of Lisp don't do that. I use Paredit mode in Emacs, which doesn't allow the parens to become mismatched and has operations like "move the last token out of this expression" and "jump to the next expression" so it actually feels like you're editing a tree rather than a chunk of text.

A quick search says there's an equivalent for VSCode, and I'm sure other editors have options as well. I've seen some amount of structural editing for languages that don't use s-expressions, but it's always pretty limited.

If you've written Lisp with a good structural editor and still don't like editing a program as a tree, then we think about code very differently.

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

#89

Post by FpUser »

Because languages are created with the purpose in mind and not a single one can tick every box. Also there are factors like user / org preferences, policies etc. etc.

There is absolutely no need for one size fits all solution because it will be always wrong.

Looks like largely rhetoric question

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

#90

Post by zoogeny »

I admit that I haven't touched CL in decades and my most recent exposure to Lisp-ish stuff is writing a bit of Scheme and reading a bit of Clojure (maybe some elisp too).

I like a lot of the ideas behind Lisp-like languages but I dislike writing in them. Parenthesis, as others mention, start to get unwieldy. I often feel like I'm expressing myself "in reverse", almost like I'm programming in Yoda speak. I mean by that, it often feels like I want to edit/add-to the beginning of a statement rather than the ending of it.

Perhaps the discomfort would dissipate with use. But to be honest, I'd rather just grab Python or even Typescript these days for the kind of ease and flexibility where raw performance doesn't matter. And there are other programming languages that excite me more than Lisp (e.g. Elixir, Unison) so my limited free time has plenty of outlets on that front.

What surprises me is that Lisp evangelists have this default assumption that their language ought to be entitled to popularity. They have some kind of "if people only knew" mentality, just like in this article, where they assume that the only reason people don't flock to their language is ignorance. Perhaps it doesn't occur to them that people try it out and then leave and never come back.

Post reply on HN