

The Legacy of Lisp (2005) [pdf] - agumonkey
http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/baker-slides.pdf

======
PaulHoule
one. word. clojure.

~~~
agumonkey
Probably. Clojurists have attempted to have DB/ACID through STM/Datomic.
core.logic and core.type for robustness. transit for intermediate
representations (xml.nextgen).

~~~
michaelsbradley
I agree that Clojure is continuing to rapidly gain mind share – among long-
time Lispers, relative newcomers to programming, and also seasoned "curly
bracers" that a few years ago never thought they'd see a day when Lisp would
make it into mainstream dev shops. Personally, I like it a lot and use it on a
daily basis. The excitement around it is in no small part due to the
insightfulness and ongoing hard work of Rich Hickey[1], his close
collaborators at Cognitect[2], and some amazingly dedicated community talent
(e.g. Philip Hagelberg[3]). Not to be overlooked is the brilliant decision to
have it be a "hosted language" that interoperates with non-Clojure code on the
JVM with little to no hassle _– that opens a lot of doors, better believe it!_

That being said, I attended RacketCon 2014[4] last Saturday and was blown away
by the work going on in that community. Michael Fogus[5], a well-known name in
the Clojure community, even gave the keynote[6]. The language's creator, Prof.
Matthias Felleisen[7], and his grad students have been doing truly cutting-
edge work over the last 18+ years (what became Racket was "conceived" at Rice
University in Fall 1995). It's a fair question, though, whether the Racket
team even _wants_ the language to "make it big," i.e. along the lines of
Clojure's rapid rise in popularity. I got the impression they have mixed
feelings about that prospect, and those concerns have certainly shaped (and
will shape) their marketing of Racket.

My thought is that if, in the next couple of years, they are able to achieve a
really good compile-to-JS story (some work has been done already[8]) and a
solid JVM-hosted implementation, then they may get a bunch of spill-over from
the Clojure community without even trying to "steal sheep". There are some
tremendously powerful language-level facilities already built into Racket that
will likely _not_ be implemented in Clojure any time in the foreseeable
future, e.g. delimited continuations[9]. Also, the Racket team seems to have
the right mind about learning from other languages, e.g. picking up some of
the popular idioms from Clojure.

So, all in all, I think Lisp's legacy is far from definitive and it will be
truly exciting to see what comes out of the Clojure and Racket camps over the
next 5 years or so!

[1] [https://twitter.com/richhickey](https://twitter.com/richhickey)

[2] [http://cognitect.com/](http://cognitect.com/)

[3] [https://github.com/technomancy/](https://github.com/technomancy/)

[4] [http://con.racket-lang.org/](http://con.racket-lang.org/)

[5] [http://blog.fogus.me/](http://blog.fogus.me/)

[6]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe2tK5Lxybc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe2tK5Lxybc)

[7]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Felleisen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Felleisen)

[8] [https://github.com/dyoo/whalesong](https://github.com/dyoo/whalesong)

[9] [http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/conts.html](http://docs.racket-
lang.org/guide/conts.html)

