

The Popularity of Four Lisp Dialects on Github - Meatball_py
http://wenshanren.org/?p=267

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brudgers
Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already
established other repositories.

That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not
necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.

~~~
BadassFractal
I also suspect that Github might be a terrible sample of the overall
programming community. I'd be curious to find out what the real numbers are if
we also take in consideration the large corp, gov and science conglomerates
who might be using anything form COBOL to Ada.

~~~
petsos
Large corporations, governments and science conglomerates that use COBOL and
Ada are not part of any community.

~~~
BadassFractal
Is NASA not a community? I don't know.

~~~
coldtea
No, it's a company/organisation.

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qnr
The author didn't mention racket. Anyway, since the article is a few months
old, I went to github and got the new data (as of today):

#20 - Emacs Lisp

#24 - Clojure

#25 - Racket

#35 - Scheme

#36 - Common Lisp

Interestingly, had PLT Scheme not been renamed into Racket, Scheme would
probably be the most popular Lisp on Github.

~~~
peatmoss
For whatever reason, Racket has been the lisp that I sort of looked at last.
Like many I-want-to-learn-lisp people, I went through a terrible survey of
available options. I went through most of Practical Common Lisp, and then
found Clojure. Recently, I've found Racket as the result of my wife deciding
she'd learn a little programming via the introductory Coursera course taught
in Racket.

I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with Racket. Everything from its beginner-
friendly environment, to its functional disposition, to the availability of
decent libraries, to its research into new areas such as type systems,
everything feels very nicely constructed.

The only thing I really miss from Clojure is the syntactic support for maps
and vectors, and the pervasive destructuring of said same.

~~~
takikawa
> The only thing I really miss from Clojure is the syntactic support for maps
> and vectors, and the pervasive destructuring of said same.

What do you mean by syntactic support for maps and vectors?

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BadassFractal
Lisp is probably never going to get huge and that's ok. It's a niche language
for a subset of the programming community that has a specific set of values,
and not everybody needs to or wants to share them. Obviously lisp users think
you're missing out if you're not using a lisp, and will help you out as much
as possible if you decide to join the so called renaissance. However I think
the community understands that it's not for everybody.

I also suspect the initial jump into a purely functional paradigm (and then
even further into code as data) might be too big of a hurdle to overcome for
most developers, who are better off staying productive in their existing
idioms.

~~~
girvo
My thing is that Lisps feel... Wrong, I suppose, for doing web development.
They don't seem to match my way of thinking when architecture web apps. I say
this as someone who wrote a routing framework for Pharen, a Lisp dialect that
compiles to PHP, so it's less pure than other dialects and has the "power" of
PHP underneath it. Still didn't fit.

Perhaps I need to change the way I think. For solving maths problems and
crunching numbers (I have most of a BSci in Mathematics) its brilliant
(Clojure in particular). Fits perfectly.

~~~
BadassFractal
You're right, it's probably in the eye of the beholder. To me something like a
Clojure Ring app makes perfect sense. You get a request map, pipe it through a
bajillion functions until you hit the DB, then you take the results of your DB
operations and pipe them back through a bajillion functions all the way back
to HTTP.

~~~
girvo
Oh, request-response maps (heh) well to lisps; I copied Ring's API for my
project. My biggest issue I guess, is getting out of a Class and Interface
mindset.

That said, do you have any advice for how to think about state in regards to
web development? The database and its various assumptions were my biggest
headache. What is the go-to library for Clojure here?

~~~
islon
Well, in a typical web application (the server part) all your state is
normally in the database so you don't need to worry about it. Just use pure
functions that process the request get/put the data in the database and give
the response. Do you have any specific needs for state other than the
database?

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fabriceleal
"One of the biggest problems of Lisp is the lack of reliable libraries" \- on
Common Lisp there's quicklisp, which is a source of libraries. I'm not using
Lisp at production, so I can't attest to their "reliability", but don't seem
"buggy" either.

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runarberg
Even though most of my code is in Python and JavaScript, and probably is going
to remain that in the near future, and by far the majority of my Lisp coding
is and will remain in ELisp, Scheme is, and most likely will remain, my
favourite programming language.

I don't use it for any practical reason, on any code that others might pick up
on and build on top. I use it purely as a hobbyist language, and for that it's
awesome. Scheme is how I learned Computer Science (even though I learned how
to program in Python). Scheme is awesome for multiple reasons, more reasons
than other languages in my opinion, and popularity is not one of theme. And
that is perfectly fine.

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wukix
The author mentions Lisp on Android. Shameless plug:
[https://wukix.com/mocl](https://wukix.com/mocl)

