Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).

However, I don't think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.

So, what's the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn't have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.

Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn't "get it" - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.

Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.

tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? Everything I've read makes absolutely no sense why it isn't. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves.

My opinion - a lot of it comes down to implementation. There are a couple of really good open source implementations, but for the most part a lot of Lisp folks prefer the commercial ones. Anecdotally, Lisp came along so long ago that it has survived several different phases of computer software sales evolution. The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty. So while I use the heck out of SBCL, I must admit that I find myself occasionally envious of the libraries and attention, and especially smoothness of integration with new technology (as opposed to new paradigms) that other dynamic languages such as python and ruby seem to enjoy.

I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards.

The "high level language" which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is inelegant and inexpressive. Perhaps people who hacked larger computers of the era did not interact with microcomputer hobbyists. Perhaps it was too difficult to get Lisp fast enough to be usable on the old hardware, although if it was possible on big iron in the late 1950s, it should have also been possible on microprocessors in the 1970s.

An entire generation of programmers grew up using GOTO to call subroutines and execute loops. That same generation could have grown up using lambdas. How sad.

I am not an Lisp user at the moment, but I worked on a project before with NAG IRIS Explorer, which is a scientific data visualization tool. The scripting language in the system is scheme based around 1993. (I think it is a dialect of scheme that is closed to GNU Guile).

I think scheme/lisp is used inside a lot of big systems, such as AutoCAD, Emacs, IRIS Explorer and probably more. One of computer graphic pioneers Ken Perlin wrote a shading language for his own renderer in scheme. But unless you use his renderer, you will never know he put a scheme interpreter inside to process his shading language.

Good point. Bad assumption on my part.