Why Lisp? 3 answers

These are terrible answers to the question "Why Lisp?" (to which the most obvious answer would be "For what?").<p>1) Good ideas? Yes, it did, but many modern languages implement them so it is no longer a reason to use Lisp. Macros? There are numerous arguments on both sides about whether those are good or bad. Needless to say, not enough to justify using Lisp.<p>2) Your "extension to the language" is my "wtf is this developer doing here?" Consistent syntax is part of what makes a language intelligible to many different people. I don't want to be a human parser to understand code.<p>3) Thrust/weight... ?. OK, I think your point is that there is little syntax to understand. Unfortunately, that means that context needs to be parsed by the developer because there are few "road signs" that tell me what is going on without reading the whole chunk of code in detail.<p>Finally, I'm not sure what this is in response to (other than it being the eternal question that burns in the hearts of all men) but if it is an argument for using Lisp on a project, it would be better directed at what Lisp has that makes it good for production work in a modern environment. However, in that way, I don't think it is much better than many of the other languages today.

Note to any potential readers: I was barely a vertebrate when I wrote this (edit: that must have been 6-8 years ago). I did so because I had selected TinyScheme for a project that I was doing at work and a bunch of people who had never heard of scheme or lisp wanted to know why. I briefly got tired of talking about it (which is rather unusual, to those who know me), and wrote this.<p>I still think that lisp is a great language to learn (although forth is even lighter-weight and about equally powerful), and like clojure a lot for practical work nowadays.

<i>"Sadly, something essentially killed lisp innovation around the time Common Lisp got standardized"</i><p>I think it was timing, more than anything else.<p>The movement to create Common Lisp came right on the cusp of several important shifts in computing. The first was from specialized hardware to standardized platforms. Lisp bet heavily on the former as embodied in Lisp machines at the very time that ISA and x86 machines proliferated.<p>The second shift was from command lines to GUI's and the Common Lisp standard lacks facilities for windows and other GUI elements. There is no equivalent of Swing in Common Lisp.<p>At the time it was standardized, Common Lisp just missed the explosion of the commercial internet and the distribution advantages it afforded Java just a few years later.<p>Finally, the way in which the Lisp community tended (and still tends) to shun Microsoft Windows, probably played an important role in limiting its general adoption. After the demise of Lisp machines, the remaining segment of the Lisp community tended toward FOSS partisanship - somewhat unsurprising since RMS emerged from the Lisp community and it was closed source Lisp code which first led him to action.<p>In short, Lisp was both unlucky and placed bad bets relative to the current state of affairs. The ultimate effect of a bias toward FOSS remains undetermined.

I was excited about Lisp for a while, primarily based on all the claims of increased productivity.<p>I started going to Lisp and Clojure meetups while learning, and I was struck how much LESS productive the supposed gurus at the meetups were in Lisp than I am in Python.<p>Maybe that reflects on the language. Maybe these people were posers. But the claims I hear seemed inconsistent with what I saw.

For personal use, sure. For anything else, language choice requires bottom-up campaigning or top-down mandates--Lisp never even enters the conversation, at least in any serious way. Language choice is also heavily dependent on mature third-party libraries, which are in abundance in many languages but not as much with Lisp dialects (unfortunately).<p>Ruby and JavaScript have adopted enough Lisp concepts and in a lot of organizations enjoy enough support that pushing for real Lisp is a touch quixotic.

There were a lot of good ideas explored in Lisp - but not always they were first developed in Lisp (for example OOP came from Simula and Smalltalk to Lisp and merged their with Lisp approaches). Many ideas developed in Lisp have not even been reused now. It is buried in computer science reports from 60-90 (which no one reads anymore) and code which has been lost (or is not accessible). Example: Lisp 1.5 from the 60s had a bitmap used for marking objects during GC - Ruby 2.0 just now implemented this thing. One could have read old Lisp implementations from the last 50 years - but this is not how people work. Few people study old stuff and harvest it.<p>The flexibility of Lisp to change the language in multiple dimensions is still valid. There are few languages which provide it in a seamless and built-in way. That's why some people still use Lisp. It's also a thing which limits Lisp: it is more difficult to understand and goes against the coding standards in 'enterprise software development'.

&#62; you can even make your own syntactic extensions, so if infix math is necessary, then you can have it<p>...in what Lisp and how can one do this?

I'm usually sceptical about "Why Lisp?" "Practical Common Lisp" offers the confident (and subjective) "You'll get more done, faster, using it than you would using pretty much any other language."<p>Well, this is much better.

"To an unusual degree, someone who codes in lisp is on nearly equal footing with the implementer."<p>Working with good developers =&#62; kinda cool.<p>Working with average developers =&#62; oh my god why.

I have used Lisp as a hobbyist but always find myself coming back to the same issue: not every data structure is a list.<p><a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-python-not-lisp.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-python-not-lisp.html</a><p>Another way to put it, as I did at the end of that post, is: why should I have to reprogram my brain to fit the language?

Why Lisp?<p>It's fun to play with when I need a break from work or projects. In the real world work environment I need to write mundane code maintainable by coworkers and clients, so it's not there. In my hobby, C and assembly rule the tight memory spaces of embedded hardware, so Lisp exists in a shared dream-state with Smalltalk and Oberon...

Three answers are all the same: macros, macros, macros.

JavaScript is enough of a Lisp, and it runs everywhere and is attached to a (more-or-less) standard UI environment that is getting increasingly powerful. And if you really like Lisp syntax, and believe in enforced immutability, there's always ClojureScript.

LISP is great for learning, here's a tip though. If SICP is too advanced, start with Simply Scheme or The Little Schemer instead.

The only reason this site loves LISP is because PG said it was special. What a joke. Sorry to be terse but this whole place is either insane or plain stupid when it goes on about LISP.

These must have been awesome answers in the late 80's.