Re:Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
by mbrodersen on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @04:46PM
(#29815457)
Yep there are cool things you can do in Lisp that you can’t do in other languages. But, as you say, it doesn’t matter to most developers. What matters to most developers is a large language community, and a great selection of battle proven frameworks/libraries to make their job easy. Look at JavaScript going from the ugly duckling of languages that nobody use, to being absolutely essential to millions of programmers everywhere. Not because of the language, but because of the large community of developers forced to use JavaScript, resulting in a huge supply of frameworks and support/help available to JavaScript developers. If Lisp had been used instead of JavaScript, it might have been equally popular today. I personally would have preferred that actually.
Re:Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
by mtrower on Thursday January 13, 2022 @07:04AM
(#29919801)
> If Lisp had been used instead of JavaScript, it might have been equally popular today. I personally would have preferred that actually.
And how close we came... and yet so far =(
Re:Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
by mbrodersen on Friday January 14, 2022 @12:00AM
(#29930747)
Yeah it would have been really interesting to have scheme in the position where JS is today.
Some time ago I wrote a sort of DevOps tool in Python (because I know better than to start new projects in Lisp in most settings). This tool had preconfigured tasks defined as point-free style functions that were easily composable. Non programmers were able to define their own pipelines either submitting a YAML file or dragging & dropping these components in a web UI. This was very powerful, but anything remotely complex (if you didn't want to end up reinventing Forth) required dropping down to Python to define these.
JSON and YAML are very good at conveying structure, but fall sort for anything else. It would be like doing any sort of complex programming with Ansible via just using roles and playbooks. It's possible, but no one sane does.
Now the question is if this really matters. Judging at the shape of the industry, the clear answer is no.