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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?

#161

Post by LispSporks22 »

m463 wrote: post #105
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…

I like python significantly more than lisp. There are so many ways to express yourself in python that are troublesome in lisp. I actually think list manipulation is easier in python than lisp. I don't know, is there a lisp dialect that makes common data structures available in a multitude of ways? I seem to be able to manipulate lists quite easily in python, and switch back and forth to sets or hashes. but in lisp yo…

I don’t think you know Common Lisp very well, or are talking about some super limited Lisp dialect I’ve never heard of.

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

#162

Post by LispSporks22 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #53
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…

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)

Reads less like Perl in Lisp:

    (loop for i below 10 when (zerop (mod i 3)) collect (* i i))

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

#163

Post by tcmart14 »

samatman wrote: post #139
tmtvl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is SBCL, which does get some development, but not much I think? Quoth the website*: > New SBCL versions are usually released at the end of each month Also, the only BSD which has even in the single digits of market share, Darwin, is only 1 point release behind. * https://sbcl.org/all-news.html >

Half of the phones in the US run BSD. Good luck getting SBCL on it though.

The 'BSD' on phones would be iOS and tons of languages don't mostly due to the platform.

I think a better example would be, the amount of embedded/appliances that ship forks of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD. Think of like routers. While Linux is the 1,000 pound gorilla in server space, there is still A LOT of BSD servers also. The person dimising BSD usage is only taking into account desktop share not realizing some OSs run on more than just consumer devices.

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

#164

Post by srcreigh »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #53
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…

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)

In racket:

    (for/list ([i (in-range 10)
               #:when (zero? (remainder i 3))])
       (pow i 2))
there’s also for/vector for/and for/or for/first for/last, most likely for/set. Hashes. can add your own, etc…

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

#165

Post by binary132 »

None of these "programming language evolutionary fitness retrospective" discussions ever manage to address the real heart(s) of the question:

- UNIX is C, so C-family languages won.

- The network effect is by far the most dominant force in the matter.

All of us would like to believe that we operate in a world where technical merit determines memetic fitness, because our jobs seem to depend on it: after all, if we build good things, we immediately see the consequences, and others must also see and appreciate these consequences, right? By doing well at that, we succeed, right?

Well, it turns out it's not so much like that actually.

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

#166

Post by mark_l_watson »

massysett wrote: post #49
WillAdams wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you build SBCL from source, enable the compressed heaps option. Then when you create an app with save-lisp-and-die, you get a fairly small app even without having a treeshaker to remove unused code.

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

#167

Post by bitwize »

jjav wrote: post #107
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 didn't see mentioned in the thread (maybe missed it) the #1 reason, IMO, that Lisp can't be popular in companies. Everyone should take the time to learn Lisp and do a handful of personal projects with it. It'll help your growth as a software engineer. Just do it! But that doesn't make it a great corporate language. Lips is infinitely flexible, you can mutate it to be what you want. That's cool and feels awesome. Al…

> Also: a maintenance nightmare as soon as you have more than ~1 person working on the codebase!

Lisp isn't any harder to maintain than any other language. The Lisp codebases I've worked on, even professionally, were originally written by talented, experienced engineers and were in fact wonderful to maintain.

> Now imagine something like Lisp where every developer & team morphs it in a different way and you have a product with hundreds of developers on it.

Dr. Ian Malcom's could/should distinction applies here. Most Lisp teams do not "morph the language" willy-nilly. They set standards of what to do and what not to do, establish a house style, build up a library of in-house functions and macros, and the more junior programmers imitate the more senior ones, just like any other dev team in any other language. And the vast majority of Lisp teams are small, even if they are working on large applications.

"We wanted to make it possible for very large projects to be done by small teams of people and for smaller ones to be done by one person." --Tom Diaz, Director of Software Products, Symbolics, 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K01FQ73xgY&t=144s

> The anti-Lisp is something like Go. Simple, not very flexible, everyone does it the same way mostly, you can plug & play developers like scrum demands we do.

I think you might be on to something. Symbolics was very much in danger of making large software projects possible by one person or a small team of people. It seems as if the corporate world has responded to the proliferation of more powerful software development tools -- not only in Lisp, but certainly Lisp and Smalltalk had an outsized influence -- by lowering the skill ceiling to make devs more fungible, and creating more and more process to hobble their productivity so as to justify larger teams of devs and dev-adjacent personnel: PMs, POs, scrum masters, etc.

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

#168

Post by mark_l_watson »

Animats wrote: post #81

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…

Thanks John, you make great points on the advantages of ‘moving on’ from Common Lisp. I still use Common Lisp a fair amount just because it makes me happy to do so. While I need to use Python, using Lisp languages is just a preference. Because I am retired now, I have thought of starting with something bare-bones like Chez Scheme and making a long term hobby of building up my own environment mostly just for myself. The author of Gerbil Scheme started with the excellent Gambit/C Scheme and did this, and now the Gerbil ecosystem is really cool.

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

#170

Post by HexDecOctBin »

Zak wrote: post #88
IshKebab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> operations like "move the last token out of this expression" and "jump to the next expression"

And that is the problem. When I am writing code, last thing I want to do is to think about tree manipulation and the numerous commands to do similar-but-not-the-same operations.

This is the same reason I don't like Vim, it's hard enough to keep the problem domain in mind, there's no mental space to also remember the ed-style editing commands.

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