Lisp is not unpopular (look at all the programming newbies around!), it's simply much misunderstood (like many of the high-end solutions, because its simple looking base is all but trivial...)
What's the misunderstanding exactly?
Why Lisp Is Unpopular
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Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#22"Unpopular" needs to be further qualified. Rather than ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular?", ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular for X?". Lisp is actually reasonably popular for some things, and it's those things to which existing dialects are best adapted. Being well adapted to Y often means not being especially well adapted to X, even if it's for subtle reasons.
It's like asking, "Why are Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) not very popular on the African savanna?" Because they didn't evolve in response to the demands of that environment. The bat-eared fox, Otocyon megalotis, did.
The differences between Alopex and Otocyon aren't so massive that they seem like totally different kinds of animals. But it would be tricky to predict exactly what they should be, and develop the right kind of fox in a lab. Some adaptations are obvious (thick fur), other less so (specialized circulatory system). I suspect the same is true for programming languages. It's tricky to determine exactly what makes Scheme better suited to the classroom than to developing general applications. Perhaps the best way to solve the problem is the way PG is doing it with Arc, which is to take a very young, malleable dialect of Lisp and plunk it down in the environment to which you want it to become well adapted, and then continue development in response to the demands you encounter.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#23You're looking at a picture of a single circuit the size of a large office building, built to a precision of 100 microns. I agree that this is impressive, but remember that you get to cheat: You build the thing, measure how far off you are, and stick delay lines in the short branches until everything lines up. Admittedly, if you're off by a hundred meters the required delays would be embarrassingly large, and the arc…
>You're looking at a picture of a single circuit the size of a large office building, built to a precision of 100 microns. I agree that this is impressive, but remember that you get to cheat: You build the thing, measure how far off you are, and stick delay lines in the short branches until everything lines up.
they call that Agile Microwave Engineering
oh, and you must have two microwave engineers working on each delay line.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#24How to make Lisp popular (or as popular as Lisp will ever get): 1) SBCL working very well on the big three PC platforms. 2) Bindings + easy installation for popular libraries. 3) Education (pg's articles, everything on planet.lisp.org) 4) Solid debugging, perhaps with things like breakpoints. There is much activity on all 4 problem items that I identified above, so Lisp IS getting more popular. I don't know if progra…
Noise != usage. Don't confuse attention with popularity. I think about the language and post comments about it on forums and read great Lisp code (e.g. Arc), but I'd never actually use it for anything non-trivial. Why? Because I write web apps and existing Lisps don't make that easier or more fun.
The only (!) thing Lisp has to do is efficiently and absolutely abstract away XML, CSS, and JavaScript. No Lisp is going to get any uptake otherwise. We could do this with Arc.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#25Another problem that LISP had was the era of it's widest use -- an era when compilers and most programming tools were proprietary, very expensive, entirely closed and usually dependent on one or another variant hardware platform. This was also the pre-cambrian era of computer architecture where the hardware varied so much that porting was a serious issue. Nowadays, languages which have popped into existance and gained wide acceptance (perl, ruby, python, for example) were developed in an open-source world. And now, finally, lisp is catching up in that regard.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#26How to make Lisp popular (or as popular as Lisp will ever get): 1) SBCL working very well on the big three PC platforms. 2) Bindings + easy installation for popular libraries. 3) Education (pg's articles, everything on planet.lisp.org) 4) Solid debugging, perhaps with things like breakpoints. There is much activity on all 4 problem items that I identified above, so Lisp IS getting more popular. I don't know if progra…
I think the problem Lisp has is that very few people are forced to use it. If you look at the average programmer, he doesn't want to think about programming, he just wants to press keys an go home. So a language that requires you to think instead of type is not something that he is going to flock to. I think the sad reality is that most programmers aren't very smart, so smart languages will never become popular. I'm…
What makes Lisp a "smart" language?
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#27The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren. (These orientations are often misguidedly referred to as "functional" and "object-oriented" paradigms, which I find to be useless, over-overloaded terms.) Basically, with list-oriented langs the primary abstraction is a tree, whereas with hashtable-orientation, it's a graph. I'm talking about the -primary abstraction- (i.e. what you "think in" when hacking); obviously you can implement any structure in any powerful enough language. If others don't see it this way please, illuminate me.
Lists confine one to rigid hierarchies, which have to be compensated for with dirty (but sexy) hacks like in-language macros. Meanwhile the index of hashtables is arbitrary, which allows you to do naturally the things you have to patch in Lisp.
Though hashtables are more powerful and easier to grok, for one reason or another nearly all (popular) hashtable-oriented languages are total crap (C++, Java, C#), but in some regard a step up from deformed languages like C (in all seriousness, how does anybody get by without first-class functions and hashtables?). My tentacles have only found two decent hashtable-oriented languages: JavaScript >~1.5 and Io.
Anyway, why is Lisp unpopular? Because it's harder for most programmers to think in lists than hashtables. Then, why does the lang have a cult following? Because it's well crafted and consistent, which seems to cause some people to overlook its shortcomings, even to the extent of seeing design flaws as features.
But as far as I'm concerned the Language War is over anyway. JavaScript won.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#28I don't understand. Is the claim that Lisp is less popular now because years ago large numbers of programmers working on government-sponsored projects had to use it, but now proportionately fewer programmers work on government-sponsored projects?
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#29I like Lisp a lot, and from my own experience I think that the main reasons why people dislike Lisp are prefix notation and parentheses . Sure, my experience is only anecdotal and not at all large. But always I've tried to introduce someone to Lisp (I'm talking of about 5 people, none of them have converted...) they seem incapable to see further than the parenthesis and the prefix notation, but specially the parenthe…
I think lisp's problems started when it wasn't designed for actual use. It is elegant, functional, and amazingly regular. Usability wasn't a design goal.
If you look at languages in wide use, they're all procedural - everything from ASM and basic to ruby and python. Similarly, all the pseudocode I've seen has been procedural. If you ask a lay person to come up with a way of making 20 pb&j sandwiches, you're going to get a list of steps for each sandwich.
I'd argue that functional thinking is not natural, it's learned. Prefix notation is not as natural as infix notation. It's not just Algol, it's likely a reflection of natural language, and the forces that shaped natural language.
My prediction is that lisp is going to become more popular in one of two scenarios. The first is that parallel processing becomes more necessary, and because functional programming is easier to parallelize, people will learn it.
The second is that lisp is redesigned with usability in mind. The fact that it's not bad as long as you use emacs+SLIME is not a ringing endorsement. One of the advantages of, say, ruby is that you don't need an advanced editor to be productive. The design goal was to make a language that's nice to use, so it is nice to use.
If lisp were redesigned with usability in mind, I could see it being more popular. However, the people who like and use lisp enough to try to redesign it likely aren't bothered too much by the syntax, so it's not something they try to fix.
Re: Why Lisp Is Unpopular
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll throw in my 2 cents... Up until recently, one "flaw" that Lisp had that other languages didn't was one obvious best implementation. If you want to work in Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, etc. you knew where to get them, and you know they would work similarly across platforms, so programs you wrote on your Mac would work on Windows and Linux, etc. With Lisp, different implementations did the "interesting" stuff (thread…
Tell me, where's the clear winner between ruby and python? Between python and PHP? Between PHP and Perl? Between OCAML and Haskell? Plenty of languages have managed to rise in popularity through a time when you didn't know if any of your code might run on the future winner. At least with Lisp implementations you know some of your code will work with the winner. "Waiting for a clear winner" is not a reason for Lisp no…
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