

Lisp: The Golden Age Isn't Coming Back, Let's Welcome a Bright Future - pchristensen
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-the-golden-age-isnt-coming-back-lets-welcome-a-bright-future/

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bobochan
This was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but I have to say I disagree
with the central premise. I love the "family of languages" aspect of Lisp and
the incredible amount of innovation that is going on with Lisps and functional
programming. Lisp has become like Jedi training, you aren't a real Lisp geek
until you have built your own light saber (aka rolled your own Lisp dialect).
The story should be to tell new people that part of using Lisp embracing this
richness. There are implementations that can get people started in a hurry and
anyone with ten minutes and access to a search engine can find them.

I used to post and even answer some questions on comp.lang.lisp and I honestly
cannot understand where it got the reputation that it seems to have. I can't
tell you how many incredibly helpful messages I received from people
correcting some of my misconceptions about macros and even helping me track
down a type in one of the books I was learning from. The regular posters there
really just had a few simple rules that were not hard to live by, e.g. don't
ask the group to do your homework, try and make some effort on a problem
before asking for help, don't continually make inflammatory claims about why
Language X or Feature Y are so much better when you have only been using the
language for three days.

~~~
pchristensen
Yeah, I agree with your points. In the article, I was trying to summarize the
impression that is conveyed by reading what people have written about Lisp. I
actually had the Jedi analogy in a draft but took it out for length - small in
number, deceptively powerful, greater than several people armed with clumsier
weapons, etc.

As for c.l.l, I've read enough people express trepidation to go there. I think
it's mostly the tongue-in-cheek fear that CS students have of compiler class.
Also, I don't doubt that most posters are courteous and helpful, but the
anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format
his hard drive traveled pretty far. The 1% of people with bad experiences are
just a lot more vocal than the rest with acceptable or positive experiences. I
think that if there was an easier setup and more thorough online
documentation, fewer people would go to c.l.l for help.

~~~
gruseom
_the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to
format his hard drive traveled pretty far_

The exact same complaints about the Lisp community were being repeated just as
much before that incident as after it. I remember reading that hard-drive post
the day it came out and thinking, this is really going to please a lot of
people - now they'll have something canonical to point to.

------
mechanical_fish
This is nice. Thanks for the various links and pointers; I dream of the day
that I have time to sit back down with Lisp and finally grok the mysteries of
the macro, and articles like yours will help.

Language designers seem to agree that the secret to giving Lisp a bright
future is to invent a brand new Language of the Future that just happens to
encompass Lisp. This is not exactly a new argument around here, since this
very site is written in a FutureLisp candidate. Other aspiring FutureLispers
include Guy Steele and Matz (<http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html>).

The thing to recognize is that Lisp's storied history is not an advantage.
It's actually a big problem for the language. People like new languages.
They're not big yet. You can grasp them. Their core team is young and obscure
enough that you have a fighting chance to join it. They haven't accumulated
decades' worth of parasitic features. They have no installed base that must be
accommodated. Their design flaws are not yet so old that they've been
enshrined as advantages. They are not steered by a committee of middle-aged
managers. They haven't spawned so many children that you can't decide between
them all. The experts haven't yet had the chance to become intimidatingly
skilled, let alone entrenched and opinionated, let alone bitter and burnt out.

The good news is that each decade's new language is a bit more Lispy than the
last. Ruby seems likely to tide me over nicely until it's finally time to jump
on the Arc bandwagon.

~~~
pchristensen
Since pg has been pretty mum on Arc and he has designed it more as a pure
language than a stack, I'm interested in Qi from Lambda Associates
(<http://www.lambdassociates.org/lC21.htm>). That sounds like a balanced
approach that solves the library problem and the implementation problem
nicely. Hopefully pg will surprise us (this winter, he says!
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98330> )

~~~
mechanical_fish
Well, this is good news. It would be nice to have FutureLisp ready for prime
time when the Ruby programmers (weaned on closures and metaprogramming!) get
frustrated with their stale, old, crufty language sometime around the year
2015.

------
jimbokun
I think this nails the challenge of getting started with Common Lisp:

'With Lisp, newbies say "How do I get started?" and instead of a URL, they get
"Lisp is a family of languages, with the primary branches being Common Lisp
and Scheme. But these are just language standards with a number of
implementations. Which implementation is best for you depends on your platform
and computing needs." Huh?'

I think SBCL is closest to being the default CL implementation, but the
functionality on Mac/Windows still isn't quite caught up to the Linux version.
Threading seems to be the biggest sticking point.

If you have a Mac, the best starting point I know of is ReadyLisp:

<http://www.newartisans.com/software/readylisp.html>

~~~
cstejerean
A common misconception with SBCL is that it cannot handle threading on OSX.
The feature has been there for quite some time and even though it's marked as
experimental, don't let that stop you. It should work just fine, especially
for development.

If you're curious about how to turn on threading you can see a post I wrote on
my blog a little while ago (or you can just read the INSTALL file SBCL comes
with).

[http://blog.offbytwo.com/2007/12/03/installing-sbcl-with-
thr...](http://blog.offbytwo.com/2007/12/03/installing-sbcl-with-threads-on-
os-x-leopard/)

------
Tichy
I've restarted learning Scheme now, and found an Eclipse plugin:
<http://schemeway.sourceforge.net/> I don't know how it compares to other
Scheme environments, but it seems to work well enough. It bundles Kawa and
SISC, but can apparently also be used with external scheme interpreters like
MzScheme.

~~~
herdrick
That plugin was a little buggy when I used it this summer. If you do something
with MzScheme you're much better off with DrScheme. DrScheme is pretty good,
and getting better - they just added rudimentary code completion, for example.
You can just use DrScheme with Kawa, too, but you lose the REPL (which is not
acceptable in my opinion).

~~~
Tichy
I don't know, the editor just seemed ugly. But perhaps I'll give it another
shot.

