I'm afraid that most people would just read the title and start completing the title with whatever ideas they have about why Lisp is not mainstream.<p>I read the whole article and its a lot of words to simply say: There are a lot of factors at play. It could be a mix of those factors.<p>Beyond that the article does not seem to give any specific insights. It provides many loose analogies to show how something good might not be not mainstream in other walks of life. But it does not go on to elaborate what it is specifically about Lisp.<p>So I guess I am trying to say I don't know what to do with this article. The talking points are all common sense. And there's nothing specific about Lisp I can learn from this article.
I’d argue modern languages have taken many of the attributes of LISP, not least the garbage collector, development tools, higher-order functions, etc. The difference is that other languages use parsing technology based on Chomsky’s grammar whereas blub languages like Lisp can’t see the value in it. But I’d say if you are programming in Java or Python you are most of the way to LISP from Pascal or C.<p>For that matter, Common Lisp had what was probably the first modern language specification, that, as much as it pretended to be machine independent, was carefully designed to be implementable on the 32-bit microprocessors that were then coming online. There was a time when I thought Java was the first programming language to be specified by adults but know I know they were following in the footsteps of Common Lisp.
I keep trying to dedicate time to getting comfortable with lisp, and it hasn't happened yet. So I just live vicariously through posts about lisps.<p>One thing that stands out about them is that they're all so happy. Try it. Search up a HN post about a Lisp. They'll be using words like "joyful".<p>So my theory is that while lisp may have plenty of technical merits, part of why it's so great is that it's typically being used by people who are having fun.<p>That's not to say that it would perform poorly if used under duress, but maybe there's some wisdom in not putting that experience that you enjoy anywhere near drudgery, lest it become contaminated.
Also related: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4</a><p>Network effects likely explain a big part of it. Many of the "popular" languages today aren't necessarily great languages and adopted for their technical merits. Often they were the only language available on an exclusive platform everyone wanted to develop software on. Other times it was because folks wanted to write a particular kind of application and there just happened to be this framework in this weird language that made the task easy.<p>We probably have more programming languages now than ever before but I think the market for new languages in the mainstream is relatively static. It shifts... but very slowly.
Reluctant to say this in the current climate of "yay static typing" but I am starting to find some things easier to express in SML than in scheme. The type driven pattern matching is a really big thing.<p>Currently liking lisp for exploratory programming and ML for precise communication of fully formed ideas to the machine.<p>Anyone happen to know a lisp/ML pair that target the same VM/IR for seamless interop between the two?<p>(in this context ML is metalanguage, ideally StandardML, though ocaml/miranda/haskell are the same sort of idea)
It's quite an entertaining rant, but the scattergun approach means that it's one of those things where it's impossible to address the points made because there's so many. But to just look at the first paragraph:<p>"There is only so much space available in a city."<p>Is there a limited number of possible LISP practitioners in the world?<p>Looking at the broader point: yes, there are a lot of factors to take into account, but perhaps we should be looking at the factors that specifically involve LISP.
I actually really liked the rhetoric made in the essay. The only problem is that the title may imply that this essay is about Lisp, while it's more about the ambiguity that are caused by words like "best".<p>The key takeaway of the essay is that: When someone questions why something supposed to be "best" isn't widely used, the answer is not solely technical. It also have sociological, philosophical, economic, and political aspects.
Is there a modern, non-JVM lisp that cleanly threads types through the expressions? I'm thinking like Haskell or Roc, where the type definitions are optional, but can be written down for clarity.<p>Lisp was by far my favorite language in college, but these days the idea of sloshing around in all those untyped s-expressions just gives me the willies.
LISP is postorder evaluation order of a tree. We can go further and more mind expansive than this!<p>The future I am trying to design is a language where traversal order is arbitrarily repetitive and arbitrary and corecursive and has term rewriting traversals.<p>I think algorithms are just reified traversal evaluation orders and joins - of algebra and mathematics.
"If X is so great, whe aren't everyone using it" implies that programming languages exist in some kind of well working marketplace of ideas where the best on their own merits win out. But it's not like that at all.
A curious counter-example to 'metaprogramming is essential'
is Zig that explicitly rejects macros and "abstraction towers",
there is no operator overloading or OOP methods.
> their <i>querty</i> keyboards<p>Is this an unintentional misspelling, or an intentional one? That it’s italicized makes me think it’s an intentional reference or joke—if so, what is it?
If you look at the examples <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigms_of_AI_Programming" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigms_of_AI_Programming</a> I'd say that these would be a struggle to implement in FORTRAN or BASIC, possible in C or C++, easy in Python, and (for me) joyful in Java. One of the most important features is having hashtables in the standard library which the last two languages have but the first four don't.