Re:I Still ‘Lisp’ (and You Should Too)
by erik_seaberg on Sunday February 19, 2023 @09:51PM
(#34864420)
Lisp debuted powerful features (GC, lexical scope, closures, destructuring, reflection) back when they were still wildly expensive. Over the decades most of these filtered into everything we use. But I still haven’t seen any rivals for using macros to provide domain-specific languages.
As such, it damn near was a superpower compared to everything else available at the time in about 1984--think Assembly, C, Pascal, etc. Garbage collection meant that all the effort everybody else spent on memory management could be spent on your problem. And the ecosystem meant that you had actual data structures to work with right in the language library instead of having to build those from scratch every time.
Emphasis on WAS. Right at about 1988, the new languages demonstrated that everybody got the message.
Perl, Tcl, Python, etc. all had garbage collection and worked very hard to create a general ecosystem. This roughly negated the advantages that Lisp had.
At that point, anybody really well versed in Perl, Tcl, Python, etc. was equally as productive as if they were writing in a Lisp.