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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. Admittedly, I intentionally worded it to look like one :)
Was that with the intent of baiting clicks, or as satire?
I guess I just wanted to see how many points it collects. So far it has exceeded my wildest expectations, although that is mainly due to the content, not the title.
I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?
In a sense, people are using it more. A lot of features that Lisp pioneered and that used to be radical back in the day (like built-in garbage collection, lambdas, first-class functions, etc) have now been assimilated in to other languages.
As a result, many Lispish things are now pretty mainstream. Not everything about Lisp has caught on, though (yet). In particular, many people are still averse to Lisp's syntax (or lack thereof), and its many parenthesis. Because of this, they're missing out on some of Lisp's most powerful features (lack of syntax and parenthesis are features, as is Lisp's very simple macro system).
Also, a lot of people have a pretty skewed, outdated view of Lisp, often based on rumors of a bad experience with some crippled Lisp they were forced to learn in school.
Very few people who have a very negative impression of Lisp have had much experience with a modern, full-featured implementation of Common Lisp (like SBCL), or Scheme (such as Chicken or Racket).
Those that have quite frequenly describe their experience with them as enlightening and often wish they could use Lisp/Scheme on their day job.
I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?
> If it is so good why ain't it is used more?
If you're using Java or C#, there are certain ways of going about things, and there's general consensus about this. You can pick up Java code that is written by someone you've never met and have a pretty good idea of being able to work out what's going on.
Something similar with python: whitespace forces a lot of style, and it's backed up by the style guide.
Whereas lisp is completely open-ended. Want to run a large system built entirely from lists? Fine. Want to build an object system tinted by your weird philosophies? Fine. Want to create sophisticated self-modifying code? Fine.
It's a worse version of a problem you have with C++, finding a common subset of things that the team will stick to (or only hiring gurus who are interested in all the quirks and who know the history).
Style arguments within teams are draining, but you need to have commonality to be able to work as a team.
Clojure has some edge here for weird reasons. It discourages recursive techniques because of limitations in the JVM. And, if you're going to be interacting with libraries from other parts of Java, you probably don't want to be acting as funky as you might be tempted to otherwise.
I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not too sure about Lisp in particular (especially there's at least few dialects of it, afaik) but I am currently looking into Clojure and, apart from bending my brain, tossing it into a rubbish bin then fetching and putting it back in, I like it very much. Also, there's a Noir [1] framework build on top of it. [1] http://www.webnoir.org/
Apparently Noir is deprecated in favor of Compojure, according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027560 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lisp is a multi-paradigm language that's perfectly capable of representing state. Perhaps you're confusing it with some purely functional language like Haskell.
I'm not saying it can't represent state; I'm saying that it promotes avoidance of state as a virtue.
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I'm not saying it can't represent state; I'm saying that it promotes avoidance of state as a virtue.
One of the reasons avoiding state is promoted is to make it easier to write robust software. State is too often the enemy of robustness.
State is too often the real world.
Mind you, I like robustness. It's like the cinder blocks I use to build my house, each robust and contained in itself. I just can't disregard state when stacking my cinder blocks on top of each other; the flexing and distribution of load is an emergent state that I have to consider when building each cinder block.
I am a intermediate programmer with just over one year experience. Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more? It is very easy to get sites running using ASP .NET, wordpress, RoR or Django. I have worked on production sites using the first two. And personally tried on small projects on the last two. Is there a way to use Lisp professionally?
"Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more?" In a sense, people are using it more. A lot of features that Lisp pioneered and that used to be radical back in the day (like built-in garbage collection, lambdas, first-class functions, etc) have now been assimilated in to other languages. As a result, many Lispish things are now pretty mainstream. Not…
I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds
With the deepest reverence to John McCarthy, I regret to say that Lisp is our cosmological constant. It creates a static universe that is otherwise expanding; it reduces the problem to a solvable one and then declares victory. The truth is, it's all state. All of it. Remember that movie "Boy in the Plastic Bubble," about a boy with an immune system deficiency who lives instead a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble? T…
In other words: functional programming and Lisp does not translate to ignoring state.