These kind of comments _always_ pop up and are either terribly missing the point or written in bad faith. There are many in this thread but I'm replying to yours as it is the one with the most replies.
Programming languages aren't just for machines to execute. There are for humans to communicate and collaborate. There are technical concerns of course, but these are secondary to social, economical and aesthetic factors or simply luck.
If you don't get why: They are the equivalent of a bunch of linguists discussing about how good and consistent the grammar of a human language is, compared to, say, English, and then someone chiming in with "well if the grammar of that language is so great, how come only a few thousand people in a small country are using it and there are almost no books published in it?"
> These kind of comments _always_ pop up and are either terribly missing the point or written in bad faith.
As someone who loves coding in Lisp myself I assure you my comment is not written in bad faith. And I am not sure what point I am missing. I read the entire TFA from top to bottom and I liked it!
I genuinely want to see a list of projects (preferably open source) written in Lisp. That would help me to support my other arguments when I talk about Lisp with others who do not use Lisp. Thanks to the HN crowd, we have already received a good list of links and examples in the comments of this thread.
I am not sure why I need to be attacked personally for a genuine question.
you shouldn't be attacked. i think its just that these type of questions do get asked a lot of time just to troll. i personally also think its a bad question because someone can give you a valid answer and you might not find the answer interesting. instead maybe it's better to ask something like:
Q: it looks like Common Lisp doesn't support (software with a C library) but it needs to if I want to do it at work. A: https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap
> I am looking for useful projects that do something useful for users who can't give a damn what language the project is written in.
Fair request.
As the instigator of the kons-9 graphics project, I had 2 primary reasons for using CL:
1) It is a language I find enjoyable to develop in. As I say, it is the only computer language I have used which doesn't fight me when I try to get things done.
2) I do hope the users of the system will care that it is written in CL, as I am attempting a language-based 3D system where the real flexibility and potential of the software will be available to those who are willing to develop tools and extensions in CL. More of an IDE and less of a typical GUI-based digital content creation system, of which there are plenty out there.
And a bonus point 3) I wanted to consciously do something different, which accepts the fact that Lisp is not the choice of least resistance. No one ever asks "Why JS?".
> either terribly missing the point or written in bad faith
Honestly, this comes across as a pretty arrogant statement.
I think it is you who is missing the point that many developers would genuinely like to see a cool language being _used_, not just admired or academically discussed. And the parent in no way disparaged the fact that one can very legitimately enjoy a language simply for the beauty of it. But it is still a very valid point to want to see it also being used for useful things.
I know those developers exists, that's why I keep reading such messages in every thread about $dead_lang.
I suggest those developers to stick to sites like https://github.com/trending instead of injecting their popularity contest questions in a thread about homoiconicity and lambda-calculus.
Lisp is pretty much "undead". We all know it and nothing, even investing billions of dollars and man hours to build the best runtime with state of the art GC implementations and library ecosystem will convince the younger generation to use it instead of something like JS. So what's the point of these questions then? Rather than curiosity driven, most of them seem defeatist and a gatekeeping effort by trolls if you read between the lines (and I do agree the post I replied to is not an example of that).
> I suggest those developers to stick to sites like https://github.com/trending instead of injecting their popularity contest questions in a thread about homoiconicity and lambda-calculus.
You are not the sole person who gets to define what this thread is about. The participants together get to decide that, and if you don't like the result, move on, instead of trying to gate-keep.
> We all know it
I'm sorry, what? This is a public forum. You're saying a 20 year-old tech interested uni student who is checking out the site for the first time has precisely the same context and knowledge as someone who's been writing in lisp for the last 30 years?
Your attitude does not bring something positive to the table here.
> You're saying a 20 year-old tech interested uni student who is checking out the site for the first time has precisely the same context and knowledge as someone who's been writing in lisp for the last 30 years?
No, but the trolls do. They know about the state of the language and hijack every Lisp related thread with this question just to troll. These are the majority. You don't happen to read many Lisp HN threads in detail do you?
> You don't happen to read many Lisp HN threads in detail do you?
Again, you could dial down the arrogance.
I do read most threads on lisp in a fair bit of detail, and I don't often find "trolls". I usually find an assortment of people interested in discussing various aspects of lisp, including its real-world utility. And I mostly find the various perspectives to be nothing but positive additions to the debate.
I daresay that you fit the description of a troll much more than someone who dares ask if lisp is actually useful.
I mean, if that's your angle, then I can sort of see your point. But at the same time: if I decided one day to properly learn lisp (so far my interest in it has been as a curious outsider), I would do so not because it's an active language, but because I'm interested in what I can learn from it. Yet I would obviously go and seek out whatever tools are written in lisp, both so I can feel that I'm really using the tooling, and so that I can look into how various real-world projects have been designed using lisp. None of that would make me a troll or a bad-faith actor in these kinds of threads. It simply means I would be asking questions about a topic on which lisp arguably does not excel, but for genuine reasons. Certainly not to rub salt anywhere. And I like to assume the same about other people who ask such questions.
Nice, I like it. Lisp as like the Dracula of languages: immortal and extraordinarily majestic and powerful, but doomed to forever prowl the night, feeding on the innocent--and occasionally turning them.
If anything, your rebuttal is in bad faith. Programming languages are not that dependent on the number of users as human languages are - which are more akin to protocols that both speaker and receiver has to know.
What reason is there to prevent someone who learnt this language to utilize it to “communicate with their computer” and share it with the rest of us? And I say that as someone who do like Clojure for example very much.
My opinion/answer is that while lisps have plenty of properties that make them great and that one gets used to all the parentheses, we as humans in the end are simply find it more alien then other languages, too uniform of a syntax hinders human parseability. (That’s why I think that clojure made a very great and pragmatic choice by introducing some other primitive data structures).
> Programming languages are not that dependent on the number of users as human languages are.
But it's still a significant factor. CTOs base their technology choices (languages and libraries) on the popularity of those.
Common Lisp is one of my favourite languages, yet when programming something with my friends I have to do so in other languages. Why? They simply don't like the syntax. It looks weird and alien to them. No amount of ecosystem, usability and performance improvements will make them ever consider it, and that's fine.
> Programming languages aren't just for machines to execute. There are for humans to communicate and collaborate. There are technical concerns of course, but these are secondary to social, economical and aesthetic factors or simply luck.
You're missing the whole point. These non-technical aspects rear their heads in real-world projects, and perhaps are more critical than technical ones. If a language is subpart in its non-technical aspects, developers are very quick to replace them with languages that are better.
And as the OP pointed out, Lisp is rarely seen or showcased in real-world projects.
Therefore someone asking "if Lisp is so great, why doesn't it get any real world use" in such a thread is doing so in bad faith.
Did UNIX win because it was the best OS at the time? What about VHS? You're oblivious if you think technical merits matter whenever you have to deal with economic factors and humans loaded with biases.
> Programming languages aren't just for machines to execute. There are for humans to communicate and collaborate.
"All it does is segfault!" I wake up in a cold sweat. It's still dark; a quick glance at the clock shows that it's about 3 in the morning. There's a stir besides me.
"Was it the dream again?" My wife says from the darkness to my side.
"It's fine, just go back to sleep."
She mumbles something incoherent and in a few moments she's snoring quietly. I lie down, but I already know there's no more sleep for me tonight.
+++
In the morning I arrive late in the office. I was in the parking lot at 7:30, but it took me an hour and a half to work up the nerve to walk in the building. They're at it again. The "collaborators". After we invented the perfect programming language for human communication and collaboration (we-lang) software developers took to calling themselves 'collaborators'. Today they're rehashing the same argument that they've been on for the past month.
"Michael, why are you always late? The computer is doing it again, and you know you're the only one who gets it." A loose mob of collaborators are standing around a 50 inch monitor on the wall. A half blank terminal monopolizes the screen. It seems to have been in the middle of producing log output, but now the cursor blinks lazily at a final message: "generic fault encountered".
It started with looks of confusion, then contempt, and finally resignation. And now I stare back, knowing how today is going to go. The same way as all days. "Yes, there are two problems, which is what I was trying to say yesterday. The first problem is that we're launching multiple threads and then they're all trying to modify the same unlocked data. And the second," I take a deep breath, "and the second is that the goal is kind of an open problem. We're potentially ambiguous in a few places and even if we weren't then it could take decades for the fastest computers to brute force a solution that conforms to the spec."
"Michael, we've been over this before. We all agreed that this is the nature that the UI should follow. We all agreed that this is how the back end ought to work. Why can't you, those mathematicians you keep talking about, and the computer all just get with the program. Maybe try being a team player for once." In the mob heads nod in ascent. We-Lang is perfect. Everyone agrees and understands everyone else. The collaboration between humanity has been achieved as if we were a single person. One mind. Unification.
But when we run it on the computer, all it does is segfault.
Programming languages aren't just for machines to execute. There are for humans to communicate and collaborate. There are technical concerns of course, but these are secondary to social, economical and aesthetic factors or simply luck.
If you don't get why: They are the equivalent of a bunch of linguists discussing about how good and consistent the grammar of a human language is, compared to, say, English, and then someone chiming in with "well if the grammar of that language is so great, how come only a few thousand people in a small country are using it and there are almost no books published in it?"