Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?

Post by tonyarkles » Thu, Feb 15, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #230

jjav wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 A…

I definitely include linters, not just style formatters. > It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp. I imagine it would be about the same, with human factors dominating. If Lisp's flexibility pushed in the direction of inconsistency, the ease with which you could write codemods for Lisp would push in the direction of consistency. > Has there ever even been any L…

Post by jshaqaw » Thu, Feb 15, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

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…

Post by elviejo » Thu, Feb 15, 2024, 2:04 PM UTC

naveen99 wrote: post #234

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 ),…

More specifically, the linked lists are too inefficient for modern computing to be the default data structure. Not enough locality, too much jumping around memory. Reality is a tree, but to organize it, you have to convert it into arrays, maps, and matrix multiplication.

Post by breather » Thu, Feb 15, 2024, 2:12 PM UTC

freilanzer wrote: post #185

breather wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tackling a significant lisp project right now, and the thing that holds me up right now is that the code is difficult to organize. Python, java, rust, go etc have well-defined patterns to figure out where code lives and where you might expect certain behaviors to occur. With lisp you can really shoot yourself in the foot very easily by using abstractions that are difficult to follow and are spread out across many…

If there's one language in existence where you can shoot yourself in the foot using abstractions it's Java. It produces spider webs of dependencies, hierarchies, etc.

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Feb 15, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #125

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…

With Rust do you close all your } manually? Do you have an example of Rust code where the equivalent Lisp code would be harder to parse, assuming equal familiarity with both languages?