How I lost my faith in Lisp

Unfortunately, the post spends most of its length on the author's professional history. It is only towards the end in which he spends a sentence or two talking about when he "lost his faith" in Lisp, but still gives not a lot of reasons. Basically, as far as I can tell, there are two major points: he used to think Lisp is great, but (1) no-one else seems to be using it and (2) the perceived superiority of Lisp was debunked when he observed experts in other programming languages.<p>Perhaps his priors were a bit off (seeing Lisp as the holy grail of all programming languages), but I think it is still fair to ask why Lisp has failed commercially? This has been discussed before, however (Lisp "wars" in the 80s, AI winter, etc.)<p>I find the way he ends his post interesting, where he argues that Lips has to evolve and improve. The article is from 2002 and in the mean time, a lot has actually happened in the Lisp world. New dialects like arc and clojure have created a renewed interest in Lisps. It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.

This is from the same Erann Gat (aka Ron Garret) who wrote the popular lisp at the JPL essay[1], and it covers some of the same ground.<p>His last point, that lisp can and should be improved, is one that he makes periodically. There's a barrier to some improvements to Common Lisp caused by the fact that the standard has been long closed and doesn't look like it will be reopened, but there have been improvement in areas that are outside of the standard.<p>For example both Ron's extended post and the previous hn discussion of this post note the pain of finding and installing lisp libraries. Quicklisp beta was recently released which relieves a significant amount of that pain.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html</a><p>Edit: I noticed this in the previous posting of this thread:<p>Ron&#62; For the record, I did not submit this article, and specifically declined a request to do so. It's not that I don't stand by what I wrote (I do) but it was written for a specific audience at a specific time and I don't think it deserves the attention that it's getting now.<p>...<p>akkartik&#62; I noticed. <a href="http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html" rel="nofollow">http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...</a> Thanks.

I'd submit <a href="http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3208226254834485@naggum.net.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3208226254834485@naggum....</a> if my site wasn't blacklisted. "What I want from my Common Lisp vendor and the Common Lisp community"

TLDR Person found out other people can be immensely productive with other languages. Then person learned languages X, Y and Z with cool libraries and is now very productive and happy using them.<p>TLDR TLDR Libraries make a big difference!

I don't speak for the author, but I had the feeling he would retract those remarks today, based on our exchanges here on HN.<p>In other news, STFU and hack. Enough with Lisp politics posts. It's just a language.

He says norvig left lisp behind when he came to google witch is true but in Codes at Work he basiclly says that it was to hard to retrain all those C++ Programmers to Lisp was to much work and he uses Python because its a better sudo-code. He still thinks lisp is better for big projects.<p>It was again the problem that people where all trained in C/C++.

Pervious discussion on Hacker News: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683</a>

A more accurate title today would be, "How I lost my faith in Common Lisp".

Note python.<p>The beginning of the article was all Lisp demolishing C and Fortran. Then he saw that Python could stand up to it. Most of the flexibility, nicer syntax and better libraries.<p>Lisp has stood still for the past 25 years. Is it any surprise the rest of the world caught up?

Great write-up! Basically a person that was using more than 20 years of Lisp successfully and considered Lisp allowing higher productivity admits that there are now other languages that allows higher productivity than Lisp.<p>At the end when I read the comment:<p>&#62; I think that if Lisp does not evolve it will die, and I &#62; don't want to see that happen. I still think Lisp is &#62; great. I also think it can be, and should be, improved.<p>I wonder what kind of improvements does the author have in his mind! If somebody knows please kindly enlighten me.