News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by zitterbewegung on Friday June 02, 2023 @08:00AM (#36163969)
Has any lisp like language become popular ? I think the most popular was Dylan and o know the racket team is doing something similar.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by mepian on Friday June 02, 2023 @08:28AM (#36164183)
Dylan was never really popular. As far as I know, Common Lisp had the largest number of users, maybe Clojure eclipsed it by now.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by gpderetta on Friday June 02, 2023 @08:40AM (#36164293)
elisp :D
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by bjoli on Friday June 02, 2023 @08:53AM (#36164431)
"many users" and "popular" don't always overlap.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by notacoward on Friday June 02, 2023 @01:12PM (#36167907)
Etymologically, they sure do. For all of its warts, elisp has not only many users but many programmers who have created some pretty complicated stuff. It's definitely a contender.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by bjoli on Saturday June 03, 2023 @04:00PM (#36180005)
Popular has many meanings. If one takes popular to mean done/used by many then sure. You are right. Filing tax returns is popular by the same definition.

If you mean popular as in the antonym of unpopular I don't think elisp can be called popular. I have written several thousand lines of elisp outside of my Emacs config, and it is probably my least favourite lisp - and I believe most people who know more lisps than elisp think like I do.

Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by flowcont on Friday June 02, 2023 @08:09AM (#36164047)
Clojure?
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by klibertp on Friday June 02, 2023 @09:09AM (#36164567)
Well, historically and technically, Lisps already became popular half a century ago, then they fell from grace. Also, depends on your definition of popularity: anything outside of Top 10 on TIOBE looks like a rounding error compared to the big guys.

Dylan was a great language - I played with OpenDylan a bit. Scheme with CLOS and gradual typing, and a formal specification, and a stdlib, and tools for modularizing and AOT compiling and linking multi-module projects, hygienic (syntax-case-style) macros, and so on, all in ca. '95! It was a bit too late and Java took over the world before Dylan had its chance... Imagine the world, full of sunshine and rainbows, if Dylan prevailed - instead of the dreary, stifling, primitive language we all know and love (to hate).

Racket is doing nothing similar to Dylan. Dylan was a well defined language for programming in the large and targeted at enterprises. Racket is a laboratory and a workbench for creating languages. It accomplishes this by implementing incredibly powerful macro and module systems. Other notable features of Racket are delimited continuations, contracts, and the Typed Racket dialect. It is targeted at researchers and beginners and has nothing to do with the enterprise. :)

Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by andsoitis on Friday June 02, 2023 @09:14AM (#36164612)
> depends on your definition of popularity

I'm a Common Lisp fan, but nobody would claim that it is popular. I don't know that "popularity" is as subjective as you describe.

Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by klibertp on Friday June 02, 2023 @09:39AM (#36164896)
Kotlin is widely popular, official language for one of the two dominant mobile platforms. It accounts for 0.37% of all search results gathered by TIOBE. Meanwhile, languages on the first 4 positions account for more than 50% of hits. Languages like PHP or Go, which you can still call pretty popular are on the order of 1-2 %.

It's completely subjective. The objective metrics (if web search are them, which is kind of dubious) tell us that whatever-language-you-like is probably orders of magnitude less popular than Fortran. The "real" popularity that you experience - how big the community is, how many packages are published, how many success stories are there - heavily depend on where you are, who you know, and what you want.

The index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by andsoitis on Friday June 02, 2023 @10:41AM (#36165743)
So all programming languages are popular?
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by klibertp on Friday June 02, 2023 @01:10PM (#36167891)
More like all but 5 or 10 are incomparably unpopular... But I'm pretty bad at statistics, so maybe your conclusion is truer.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by erik_seaberg on Sunday June 04, 2023 @07:05AM (#36184659)
I've always been troubled by a popularity metric that rewards a language for attracting a lot of novices who need help with it more often. I care more what experts use, but there isn't as much incentive for them to tell us.
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by ofrzeta on Friday June 02, 2023 @11:43AM (#36166674)
Maybe AutoLISP :) (the built-in LISP dialect in AutoCAD)
Re:Cakelisp: A performance-oriented Lisp-like language by JonChesterfield on Friday June 02, 2023 @05:38PM (#36171100)
There's a weird one called javascript that seems to have picked up some fans