The Lisp Curse (2011)

Maybe the problem isn&#x27;t so much that Lisp is too easy, but rather that there&#x27;s no central repository for Lisp modules? Everybody runs into the &quot;I need a GUI environment&quot; and doesn&#x27;t have anywhere to search for the 30 other GUIs that have already been written and never published so they write their own. A centralized repository for these could help a lot, especially if it enforces documentation standards before accepting modules.<p>It&#x27;s a cultural issue with all of the pre-Internet languages. Even titans like C and C++ lack a well defined repository outside of their stuffy standards committee defined standard libraries. CPAN showed how powerful a resource like that can be 25 years ago and almost every language since has shipped with something similar, but old languages never seem to have caught on.

History has shown that if code must be maintained by multiple different people over time, then consistency and predictability overrides abstraction and meta-ability. Legibility by actual readers trumps linguistic or symbolic parsimony.<p>Perhaps a Lisp shop <i>could</i> force consistency, but that seems to fall apart after a while.<p>More on this viewpoint: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?GreatLispWar" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?GreatLispWar</a>

I disagree with the core premise of this article. By this logic, the most developed language ecosystems should be those built from languages which are the most difficult to develop for. Python is a clear counterexample with a comparably low barrier, and tons of existing modules with ~80% capability hacked together by random individuals. In practice, many of those partially complete projects are picked up and improved by others, or serve as direct inspiration for more rigorous implementations. I would argue the language and community are stronger because of this.<p>Lisp has been around for over half a century. It&#x27;s had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate its worth in helping people solve real world problems in production. I agree with the author there is probably a fundamental reason lisp doesn&#x27;t see this kind of use (maybe with the exception of clojure), but I seriously doubt that reason is that it&#x27;s &quot;too powerful.&quot;

<i>Imagine adding object orientation to the C and Scheme programming languages. Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup.</i><p>I like to think Brad Cox did a pretty good job and remained compatible with the base language.

&gt; Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily<p>Lisp people (like Paul Graham) say that a lot, but they also admit that there’s a pretty steep learning curve before you get to that point - at least, I’ve never heard anybody say that Lisp is both easy to use and easy learn. I actually do believe them. I used to hear the same thing about vi: it’s quick and powerful, once you get over the learning hump. I actually did take the time to get over the hump and found that I _was_ faster and more productive with it, but it took some time to get there. The time spent was worth it, but it was slow going getting there. I’ve dabbled enough in Lisp and functional programming in general on my own to believe that there’s something very powerful hiding in there… but there’s work to be done and unlike my choice of text editor which only impacts me, I have to work in a language that everybody agrees on, and so far, that’s never been Lisp.

I think a lesser version of the same problem is behind JavaScript&#x27;s Framework Hell. And JavaScript projects in general: &quot;idiomatic&quot; is an ill-defined term in the context of JavaScript, so you rely a great deal more on conventions within any given organization.

Emacs is good enough, much more powerful than many &quot;proper&quot; IDEs. But it should be ported to the proper, modern LISP or Scheme, instead of the using its own subset&#x2F;dialect. And the used dialect is incompatible [1] with everything else. Too bad that GuileEmacs[2] project died, probably because of the same curse though. Porting it to SBCL would be a game changer too.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;cl&#x2F;Porting-Common-Lisp.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;cl&#x2F;Porti...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacs</a>

<i>Update on October 6, 2017. N.B.: Please stop submitting this to Hacker News! Look at the Hacker News search results for this essay.</i><p>Oddly enough, I&#x27;ve been here for ages, and I don&#x27;t remember ever seeing this!<p><i>The power of Lisp is its own worst enemy.</i><p>The power of _insert_prog_lang_here_ is its own worst enemy. Applies to Ruby, Smalltalk, C++, Haskell, and probably many others. It even applies to PHP! You see, power comes in many forms.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.giantitp.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;showthread.php?238385-quot-Power-is-Power-quot" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.giantitp.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;showthread.php?238385-quot-Po...</a><p>2nd order sociological effects often decide the fate of programming language communities. Unfortunately, many programmers have been less competent at navigating those forces. (This has changed with the effect of the Internet on world culture, of course.)

Haskell&#x27;s type checker is not Turing-complete by default. This is a feature, not a bug, because it means that the type checker is guaranteed to terminate. Since this piece was written GHC has been extended so that non-termination can be enabled if you want it.<p>The sideswipe against the supposed venality of managers is unwarranted. Programmers are like mountaineers in a world where the terrain shifts radically and unpredictably. One day you are on top of a mountain, the next day, without having moved, you are in a deep valley. Under these circumstances teams of people in ATVs who can move rapidly across the terrain tend to have a higher average altitude than people with karabiners and ropes.

The submitted title (&quot;The Lisp Curse by Rudolf Winestock (Again, Sorry)&quot;) broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Can you please review <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a> and not do that in the future?

Speaking of Olin Shivers and reposts ... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ccs.neu.edu&#x2F;~shivers&#x2F;autoweapons.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ccs.neu.edu&#x2F;~shivers&#x2F;autoweapons.html</a><p>(More amusing than a barrel of Lisp macros)

Useless talk. If the Lisps were that powerful,every spec would end up with a Lisp implementation. We need better Lisps that make translation from spec to software easier. Lisp can improve. Lisp shall improve.

&gt; Due to the difficulty of making C object oriented, only two serious attempts at the problem have made any traction: C++ and Objective-C.<p>1. C++ is not an extension to C. Most C code would quite unacceptable C++, and considered inelegant, unsafe, and overly redundant. 2. C++ is a multi-paradigmatic programming language, not necessarily object-oriented.

&quot;We found no items matching the lisp curse&quot;

The curse of Lisp is not its power, elegance, flexibility, etc. The curse of Lisp is its syntax! Both &quot;all those parentheses&quot; and what they represent is the curse of Lisp.<p>Lisp forces coders to think in terms of infix trees. These trees need to be carried around in the front of the mind. This mental model is very difficult unless your mind is wired to be able to process code this way. For Lisp aficionados this either comes naturally or with coding practice. The &quot;parentheses&quot; fade into the background. For most people this wiring never comes. It remains too difficult to keep the nested trees straight in their heads. To put it colloquially, it&#x27;s too difficult to juggle all those parenthesis.<p>If you&#x27;re a Lisper you&#x27;ll want to believe that with use comes the familiarity to overcome this hurdle. It&#x27;s not. If you&#x27;re a Lisper your probably tempted to redactor a sample chunk of code into something really readable to show this isn&#x27;t the case. However, that only works in the small. It&#x27;s like code golf. It doesn&#x27;t carry over into large scale applications. Lisps mental model just won&#x27;t become second nature to very many coders.<p>Haskell forces you to juggle &quot;math.&quot; Forth forces you to juggle &quot;stacks.&quot; Lisp forces you to juggle &quot;trees.&quot; The popular Algol descendants are popular, in part, because they&#x27;re closest to the way people think. The curse of unique brains is the curse of Lisp.