Would it be funny if Lisp turns out to be something everyone really does love, but the problem was actually the crappy and fractured implementations and the libraries that existed with all the old versions of Common Lisp?
Or would it be like, tragic, or maybe something else.
I thought all high-level languages were complete garbage, until I had to write serious concurrent code in C/CUDA. After a year doing that kind of crap, first-class functions and easy to write transactions were like heaven on Earth.
And clojure-dev makes it pretty straightforward to use all those parens, but I wish it was more emacs-y in its tabbing.
Just to show how impressed I am, I used vim exclusively for two years, then went out of my way to learn emacs to use clojure. Combine some of the most helpful emacs features with the clojure-dev plugin for Eclipse and this thing will take off, IMHO.
No need to learn a new editor. There is a great plugin to use Vim with Clojure. I've always been a Vim user and think its great, although I've never used SLIME so I can't directly compare.
Crappy Common Lisp implementations?... Did you try a few different implementations and found out they're crappy or you're just assuming things?
I never had a problem with SBCL (I didn't try others).
And about the supposed "fracturation" of implementations, first it's not a problem if you use only standardized features, second a lot of features (threads, sockets, etc) that aren't standardized are still well-supported in implementations and there are libraries that hide the minor incompatibilities between implementations.
Want threads? cl-thread. Want sockets? bordeaux-threads. Want access to the Meta-Object Protocol? cl-mop. Want generalized streams? gray-streams.
I believe the perceived problems are really blown out of proportion. Maybe CL implementations were crappy in 1995 but things change and sometimes you have to revise your assumptions.
Okay, so you're saying that Common Lisp doesn't have any problems with fractured implementations as long as you spackle over them? Common man. I'm not trying to dis Lisp. I like Lisp... well to a certain extent; it's not my favorite.
I'm just saying that if people are having a love fest on Clojure, maybe the reason Lisp never got adopted had more to do with the implementations available than the language itself.
The whole parens thing is pretty silly. It only turns people off because they think somehow that they it's OK to be turned off by them.
Could you imagine if someone went into a C++ forum and complained about all the semicolons and brackets? They'd get laughed right out of their Usenet client. Instead, people try to make it OK that people don't like parens, by constantly bringing up the parens in hushed voices like they are some sort of evil force out to steal our first-born children.
It's bizarre, especially in light of the fact that people don't seem to have any problems with any other sigils.
Or would it be like, tragic, or maybe something else.