Using Lisp at Paragent

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/10/lisp-for-agile-teams

by projectileboy • 19 years ago

17 26 19 years ago

brlewis2• 19 years ago

"Whether or not Lisp becomes more popular with a new generation of developers remains to be seen."

My bet is it won't. Lisp success stories have been around for ages. PG has articulated its advantages well, as have others. There's some psychological reason why it has never achieved massive popularity. If it ever becomes massively popular, it will be in a generation that is somehow psychologically different.

johnrob• 19 years ago

I think that's a good thing. If it gets popular, there won't be a competitive advantage to knowing it.

curi2• 19 years ago

taking that attitude further, let's wish everyone hated computers except yc readers, so we could have a big competitive advantage.

jsmcgd• 19 years ago

I think this is one of the main reasons that Lisp isn't popular; many in the community don't want it to be. This fact, along with sparse documentation and until recently, a lack of accessible editors have hampered growth. For a long time the only thing going for lisp seemed to be the language itself.

abstractbill• 19 years ago

The hot languages in the circles I move in (Python and Ruby) are, from my point of view, poor-man's Lisps.

Quoting Guy Steele, on Java, "we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"

I believe languages (both hot and widely used) will continue to move in the general direction of Lisp. As for why more people don't just leapfrog that process, I think the best answer is in Worse-Is-Better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html).

brlewis2• 19 years ago

I don't think Richard Gabriel nailed the genesis of worse-is-better popularity. If valuing implementation simplicity above all else were it, then Scheme would be very popular. Unix and C became more popular than Lisp by running fast on cheaper hardware. For a long time Lisp has run fast on cheap hardware, but it's still not popular.

But if either simplicity of implementation or speed were necessary preconditions of popularity, how would Java have become so popular? Marketing? If marketing is what matters, how did Java (in its C# incarnation) displace Visual Basic?

Any time I hear someone say "Lisp would be popular except for problem X" I think of some other computer language that became popular despite problem X. Even its supposedly problematic syntax. Look at XML; it's popular, and has a syntax pretty much like s-expressions only worse.

Complexity of implementation? Slowness? Lack of marketing? Unfamiliar syntax? No, none of these explain the lack of popularity. Someday somebody will hit on what the real roadblock is and remove it, probably by accident.

mdemare2• 19 years ago

And Ruby dragged the Java programmers halfway to Lisp. Who will drag the Ruby programmers halfway to Lisp? We'll never get to Lisp at this rate, but we'll approach it ever closer.

mmiller4• 19 years ago

"Worse Is Better" is an old article, I think from the early 1990s. Back then Lisp did run slowly. I can remember taking a course around 1989/1990 that had us running the n-queens problem in Lisp. People would start up their n-queens programs on Unix minis and leave them running unattended, to go away for lunch or something. The programs ran for hours. This is the reason why Gabriel talks about scale (memory size) and performance. Today these are not really issues anymore. I can run the same n-queens program on my PC and it'll take just a second or two to run. That's a dramatic difference.

MuddyMo• 19 years ago

In light of this story, perhaps I should amend my quote: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72655

Using Lisp at Paragent

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