A Personal Lisp Crisis (2012)

I am not sure it is true that comp.lang.lisp barely tolerates newbies. I have posted there on several occasions and when I say something wrong, I am politely corrected. I have seen a lot of less experienced programmers come there, ask an obviously beginner question, and get helpful answers. Reading through the past few days of posts, I can see a few beginner questions which all received helpful answers.

The problem in comp.lang.lisp is the number of trolls -- in other words, the universal problem on Usenet. People come in trying to prove that some other language is superior, or asking questions like "If Lisp is so great why is nobody using it?"

I love Clojure and I think it's the first Lisp to take the language family out of "cons cell and parenthesis hell". My personal opinion is that Clojure with the following changes would take over much of the Lisp space:

- Rewrite most of Clojure in Clojure (which has been talked about since the beginning, really) to find the "small core". Thankfully ClojureScript has helped hasten the CiC movement.

- Base FFI and code gen on more abstractions so that Clojure living in a .net world or a C/C++ world or a Python world would feel just as cozy as Clojure living on the JVM. Rich Hickey talked about why he abandoned primary CLR support early on. He said he "didn't want to keep writing everything twice". This was probably the best strategy at first, but now one hopes that with ClojureScript + Clojure enough has been learned to discover more ways to factor out the commonalities so that Clojure is more easily retargetable.

- Speaking of targets: there should be a first class, fully supported Clojure frontend to LLVM. There are research projects and personal projects in this area, but that's about it. I'd like to see an official LLVM target.

- Introduce or surface more abstractions and macros such that the immutability and pure functional underpinnings could be extended, removed, or replaced. This is likely to be the most controversial change, but it would be essential to the possibility of Clojure running on small embedded systems and other environments where the choice of underlying data structures and concurrency algorithms can't come baked in. This is mostly done already (as most things in Clojure are built on top of abstractions), but it still needs a deep look.

- Open up the reader. A Lisp without full reader macros is unlikely to win over all potential converts, not because reader macros are this incredibly common thing, but because the personality of most Lisp hackers tends to thinking like "well I don't think I'll need a reader macro, but why would I want a language that won't even give me the option?"

It has been absolutely years, but I recall they didn't like homework problems. This made it really difficult to ask newb questions.

Indeed, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This author has told us up front attracting people to LISP/Clojure is not his primary goal.

There's also the minor detail that if you're a Christian the really canon stuff is in the New Testament, a lot if not most of the problematic stuff is in the Old Testament and not longer strictly applies (surely most of us remember "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"???), so I suspect the whole premise is false.

Those are all good books, I'd also recommend Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing.