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

191–200 of 339 posts

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

#191

Post by jjav »

brlewis wrote: post #121
jjav wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In companies, most languages have some kind of system to enforce style guidelines and restrict which dependencies can be used. Companies already restrict the flexibility of the languages they are already using. So flexibility is not the reason Lisp is unpopular among companies.

> some kind of system to enforce style guidelines

Are you talking about autoformatters like gofmt and its ilk? That won't enforce a consistent approach in Lisp which allows the programmer to infinitely outsmart any tool.

Or if you're talking about written-down guidelines, that can help, for a while. But those morph over time too, and so does the new code but the old code lives on forever. Every time a new CTO/Chief Architect shows up, things change but the existing code doesn't. Since we're on the topic of large companies with decades-old codebases, things have changed many many times and you'll have a very inconsistent mess in your hands. It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp.

Has there ever even been any Lisp-based company with a 20+ year old codebase where a cast of tens of thousands of developers have worked on it over the years? I can't think of any but maybe I haven't heard of it.

Lisp is awesome for a team of 1 (for about a decade I used to write all my personal use code in Lisp) or maybe a small tighly-knit group. Beyond that, I can't see it working well over the long haul.

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

#192

Post by jjav »

richie_adler wrote: post #124
jjav wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And why I love Ruby and hate Python. But yes.

Ruby is "perl-esque" in syntax, and of course TIMTOWTDI is opposite to the 13th item of the Zen of Python, so it's understandable some dislike to an express design decision. But hate ? Really?

> But hate? Really?

Yes; well maybe hate it a strong word reserved for life and death matters, but I intensely dislike python. It's like nails on a chalkboard reaction for me. It drives me crazy that it has become popular.

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

#193

Post by xigoi »

pierrebai wrote: post #69
LeoPanthera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Of course, Python would have been way more awesome if they did not reject the much more reader-friendly and idiomatic: squared_div_by_3 = [ for i in range(10): if i % 3 == 0: i**2 ] That is, just transforming the normal for loop and if into a list comprehension by surrounding it with brackets. It would even preserve the friendly forced blocking and indentation. Can you imagine?

Nim has a `collect` macro which works exactly like this.

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

#194

Post by lispm »

rurban wrote: post #181

I agree with the conference and foundation part. I've been to many lisp conferences, but they are still extremely weird, compared to other languages conferences. I'm pretty sure it's the people. Lisp is a lone man sports. There's not much community spirit. There's not much github, patches are not accepted. In general. Of course there are many great people around, of the anti-academic background. Who tried to build co…

> I'm pretty sure it's the people.

Glass house?

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

#195

Post by Jensson »

bitwize wrote: post #167
jjav wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> The Lisp codebases I've worked on, even professionally, were originally written by talented, experienced engineers

But companies have untalented junior engineers, you need a language they can write while still remaining structured.

Talented professional engineers can write assembly language in a very easy to read and structured manner. But there is a reason basically everyone writes in structured languages today instead of unstructured, that enforced structure helps make code more readable and uniform.

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

#196

Post by darthrupert »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #162
LeoPanthera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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))

Are you joking?

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

#197

Post by hanche »

Lissssp – lotss and lotss of ssilly parethesises! We hates it!

– Quoted by memory from comp.lang.lisp years ago. (Sorry, can’t remember by who.)

Really, I get the parenthesis hating: It is truly terrible to have to deal with them unless you have good editor support and have learned to use it. But then a funny thing happens: The parentheses essentially vanish! You just don’t read parentheses anymore, you read the indentation instead. In my own emacs setup, I have in fact chosen to de-emphasize the parentheses to the point where they are barely visible. It makes the code so much more readable.

Good editor support means at least semi-automatic indentation of code. Unindented code is of course unreadable, and wrongly indented code is worse. But that is true of any programming language, isn’t it?

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

#198

Post by jpc0 »

samatman wrote: post #137
dmz73 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that borrow checked in Rust is the easiest part of the language to get used to. Lifetimes on the other hand seem unnecessary in 99% cases where compiler forces you to use them - why can't it just assume that all the required parts have the 'a and complain if something violates that? Event bigger issue is all the missing features that most other languages have - overloaded functions (they kind of exist in gener…

> Lifetimes on the other hand seem unnecessary in 99% cases where compiler forces you to use them - why can't it just assume that all the required parts have the 'a and complain if something violates that? Rust does that, this is lifetime elision. If the compiler complains about missing lifetime annotations, that means it can't infer the lifetime. Granted that it not-infrequently feels like it should be able to, and…

To the contrary I ran into cases pretty quickly that rust just wasn't useful for in my opinion.

One of my use cases was something like a mutable borrow of an struct in a struct in a single threaded code path wasn't allowed because the entire struct was mutably borrowed or some nonsense.

I believe the "idiomatic" way was to create some weird abstraction to appease the borrow checker that the thing being borrowed once is only being borrowed once.

I rewrote the code in C++ and never looked back.

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

#200

Post by xigoi »

jjav wrote: post #102
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.

> I find it nearly impossible to parse this without actually maintaining the stack in my mind. You don't write out RPN in a long sequence like that. I'm a devoted RPN advocate and seeing "x y + 2 ^ = x 2 ^ 2 x y * * y 2 ^ + +" is indeed difficult to parse. But that's not at all how you use RPN. You compute the problem going from smaller units to larger units getting intermediate results as you go and combining them.…

How would you write this algebraic identity?
Post reply on HN