The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
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The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
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Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#2Lisp is probably never going to get huge and that's ok. It's a niche language for a subset of the programming community that has a specific set of values, and not everybody needs to or wants to share them. Obviously lisp users think you're missing out if you're not using a lisp, and will help you out as much as possible if you decide to join the so called renaissance. However I think the community understands that it's not for everybody.
I also suspect the initial jump into a purely functional paradigm (and then even further into code as data) might be too big of a hurdle to overcome for most developers, who are better off staying productive in their existing idioms.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#3Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories.
That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#4Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories. That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.
I also suspect that Github might be a terrible sample of the overall programming community. I'd be curious to find out what the real numbers are if we also take in consideration the large corp, gov and science conglomerates who might be using anything form COBOL to Ada.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#5Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories. That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.
in general github rankings are not a good measure of anything. f.ex. javascript ranking as #1 is no wonder, when every other web project packages some jquery plugins (or jquery the lib), and even docs often have some js in them. the ruby bias was also noticable on github from the beginning (while f.ex. I believe bitbucket has a python bias), one can only doubt it dominates less cool languages in the wild.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#6The author mentions Lisp on Android. Shameless plug: https://wukix.com/mocl
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#7Lisp is probably never going to get huge and that's ok. It's a niche language for a subset of the programming community that has a specific set of values, and not everybody needs to or wants to share them. Obviously lisp users think you're missing out if you're not using a lisp, and will help you out as much as possible if you decide to join the so called renaissance. However I think the community understands that it…
The interesting takeaway from the article is that Elisp is probably the most popular Lisp. That might be an important fact if you're an autodidact.
As to your second point, I think code-as-data is both a smaller hurdle and a bigger part of Lisp than functional programming, which was always more of a thing in Scheme and really didn't catch up to "modern" FP until Clojure. Any programmer can appreciate the usefulness of macros and templates. The argument for pure functional programming is a lot more cerebral.
I'm sure I would have been more productive if I only knew one language. The "which language should I use?" conversation that seems so debilitating would simply never happen.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#8Lisp is probably never going to get huge and that's ok. It's a niche language for a subset of the programming community that has a specific set of values, and not everybody needs to or wants to share them. Obviously lisp users think you're missing out if you're not using a lisp, and will help you out as much as possible if you decide to join the so called renaissance. However I think the community understands that it…
My thing is that Lisps feel... Wrong, I suppose, for doing web development. They don't seem to match my way of thinking when architecture web apps. I say this as someone who wrote a routing framework for Pharen, a Lisp dialect that compiles to PHP, so it's less pure than other dialects and has the "power" of PHP underneath it. Still didn't fit.
Perhaps I need to change the way I think. For solving maths problems and crunching numbers (I have most of a BSci in Mathematics) its brilliant (Clojure in particular). Fits perfectly.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#9Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories. That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.
I also suspect that Github might be a terrible sample of the overall programming community. I'd be curious to find out what the real numbers are if we also take in consideration the large corp, gov and science conglomerates who might be using anything form COBOL to Ada.
Yeah, I have to agree. My github account is pretty barren, mostly because the lion share of my work is done professionally on private repos simply sitting on a server behind a firewall. In fact, you'd be amazed at how much code in the wild simply sits in backed up files in someone's ~/src folder. Lots of engineers, especially older ones, never learned that kind of practice.
A big chunk of my code is C, C++, VHDL, Verilog, miscellaneous PLC/PAC dialects, etc... in other words, industrial stuff that doesn't get a lot of attention from the 'fun' startup sector. Github's numbers are most likely misrepresenting (not representing?) a HUGE section of 'hard' engineering. Add to that what you've mentioned, i.e. the copious amounts of legacy and domain specific stuff still lying around, and it means you've got a hugely biased sampling.
Re: The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github
#10Lisp is probably never going to get huge and that's ok. It's a niche language for a subset of the programming community that has a specific set of values, and not everybody needs to or wants to share them. Obviously lisp users think you're missing out if you're not using a lisp, and will help you out as much as possible if you decide to join the so called renaissance. However I think the community understands that it…
My thing is that Lisps feel... Wrong, I suppose, for doing web development. They don't seem to match my way of thinking when architecture web apps. I say this as someone who wrote a routing framework for Pharen, a Lisp dialect that compiles to PHP, so it's less pure than other dialects and has the "power" of PHP underneath it. Still didn't fit. Perhaps I need to change the way I think. For solving maths problems and…
You're right, it's probably in the eye of the beholder. To me something like a Clojure Ring app makes perfect sense. You get a request map, pipe it through a bajillion functions until you hit the DB, then you take the results of your DB operations and pipe them back through a bajillion functions all the way back to HTTP.