I didn't say you did.
CircleCI, Metabase, Walmart, Grammarly, ITA/Google Flights, Cisco, Rate.com, Funding Circle, Netflix and bunch of other teams that use it in production.
So which is it? It's popular or it's not popular but popularity doesn't mean anything?
Also naming a bunch of big companies doesn't mean much. When there are 10,000 employees, a few people are going to do something with niche tools. That isn't what these companies were built on and it's just a cheap use of their name. Again, it's like haskell people saying, "no on uses it? ever heard of facebook??" and it turns out to be one small program over the last 25 years of thousands of programmers' work.
Okay, tell me more about "today's standards".
Maybe you should tell me, because your comment is basically an appeal to authority without real numbers to back it up. You aren't talking about crucial features much or why you even like it.
Clojure's immutable data by default rules out a whole class of concurrency bugs
In practice this ends up being a feature with silver bullet believers like haskell's lazy evaluation, but when people try to make it work in practice the performance hits and awkwardness just don't give any benefits because you're fighting how a computer works, and if you really need it it can be replicated and used in specific situations. You can already make things const in system language and you can make structures and architectures that rely on copying data for certain parts of parallelism.
I've been working in this field for decades.
So have all the people not using lisp.
just listen to renowned CS veterans with big names
Listen to them say what exactly? You just listed a bunch of names as if that somehow makes a concrete or technical point. Most of those people don't ever use lisp in the first place so I'm not sure what this is supposed to say. "Uncle bob" is a buffoon snake oil salemen that knows less than nothing.
Lisp endures. It is thriving
Then why is the most popular lisp emacs lisp, which is less popular than 'vim script', starlark, gherkin, solitidy etc.
https://innovationgraph.github.com/global-metrics/programmin...
there are new Lisp dialects coming out every few years
Not sure this has accomplished much.
your view on where Lisps stands today is misguided.
I don't think it is. Everything points to it being influential but not used. After 70 years it might be time to accept this reality.
I think you're confusing my pragmatism for an enthusiasm of a novice. I agree, sometimes you have to let it go, and I have. I started my coding journey with BASIC, in college I learned Pascal, C and Assembly, then Turbo Pascal, then later Delphi. You might be too young to remember how huge Borland was back then and I used their tech profusely. There was a period where I coded in Actionscript and VB, picked Macromedia, started making web-pages. I even worked in some esoteric language where all the operators were in Russian - I was working on a ERP system in Dubai with my Slavic friends. Then I picked some Perl and PHP. Following Heilsberg's work on Pascal, I went to .Net, when the guy moved from Borland to Microsoft. I switched from VB to VB.net, then to C#, I picked up some F# later. I developed games for Silverlight, remember that one? I was an early adopter of Typescript, forcing my team to switch from their beloved Coffeescript, that was at the time when GitHub in their style guide was explicitly asking to use Coffeescript for new projects instead of JS. I tried almost every available altJS option - Livescript, IcedCoffescript, Purescript, ELM, Reason, Fay, Haste and GHCJS. I was heavily invested into CLR only later to realize that it started feeling like a mental prison. I switched to Python on the backend. That's when I first time saw Clojure and blindly rejected it - it looked too weird. I then learned some Haskell, tried Idris, did Ruby, Golang, etc. etc.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make - there are numerous tech pieces that I have completely parted with, with absolutely zero regret. Some pieces still remain practical - they simply work. I don't miss Pascal, Perl, Ruby or PHP. Yet I don't see any reason to bury Lisp. It just works. It remains an enormously practical tool with zero meaningful alternatives.
I can tell you with conviction that using babashka for bash-scripting, or nbb for node stuff like simple web-scrapers is far, far better experience than the alternatives. Reducing huge Lua boilerplate to a five-liner Fennel macro feels liberating. And nothing, just nothing even remotely comes close to what I do and can do with Emacs.
Trust me, another 50 years will pass, yet Lisp will remain. I can clearly see that; the idea of Lisp is simply way too practical to die. Would it ever become popular in a big team setting? Nobody can predict that. Perhaps it never will. Maybe there will be new Rusts, Kotlins and ML-like things, with Lisp carrying on in the shadows.
It's great that you have conviction but no matter how forcefully you say something this seems like your own personal journey to becoming obsessed with lisp.
That's fine, but it doesn't mean it is being used. Listing people and companies and languages with no context isn't real data.
Trust me, another 50 years will pass, yet Lisp will remain. I can clearly see that;
It has been 70 years and plenty of ideas have remained even though the actual languages are niche. You seem very confident that you can predict the future. Does this future predicting ability apply outside of 70 year old computer languages?
the idea of Lisp is simply way too practical to die.
The idea didn't, it's in the languages people use.
I never said Clojure or Lisp is "about to take over", besides you're trying to use one spam-filter system inside a PHP company example, against CircleCI, Metabase, Walmart, Grammarly, ITA/Google Flights, Cisco, Rate.com, Funding Circle, Netflix and bunch of other teams that use it in production.
> I have, they are obsessed with the rabbit hole of language pagentry
Just a random example from Netflix guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ9UZlr6C6M
There's tons of different real-life use case talks. From Boeing/Embraer, from Funding Circle, from CircleCI, from tons of smaller startups running things on prod. You're just insisting of something you haven't even bothered to give a critical look at.
> That doesn't mean it is objectively a good choice by today's standards.
Okay, tell me more about "today's standards". What do you mean? No language is "objectively a good choice". A choice is good or bad for a team, a problem and a set of constraints.
It is a great choice for specific use cases. Fintech startups notably finding that to be very true.
> it doesn't mean anything to productivity or better software.
Clojure's immutable data by default rules out a whole class of concurrency bugs, and I already gave you the real-world example: Nubank scaled to thousands of engineers on Clojure and Datomic. That is a large bet on the language at a large scale, but you're just choosing to ignore that. I get it, every niche language has its "company X uses it". But once again, I'm not advocating for a single PL specifically. I'm preaching the idea of a language. The idea you're just outright dismissing because "it would have converted everyone a long time ago."
I've been working in this field for decades. I have gone through over a dozen language stacks: different paradigms, tons of tooling, techniques, patterns, hype cycles and silver bullet calls. If I've learned anything, it's that the majority is not only not always right, but in most cases it is flat-out wrong.
You don't have to trust me on this (some rando on HN), just listen to renowned CS veterans with big names - Guy Steele Jr., Alan Kay, Sussman, John Carmack, Crockford, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Paul Graham, Uncle Bob, Steve Yegge, Dijkstra, Brendan Eich, Karpinski - there are tons of names who'd agree that Lisp is an everlasting idea.
Lisp endures. It is thriving; there are new Lisp dialects coming out every few years. Some of them are serious tools, not toys. You can realistically run Lisp on pretty much any platform today.
I'm not suggesting everyone should just drop whatever they use and switch. I'm just saying there are some ideas that are worth understanding and your view on where Lisps stands today is misguided.
> This is a nonsense statement that doesn't relate to the conversation.
I.e., "lambda-calculus doesn't help anyone ship software". Yeah, maybe you're right. Yet it is still in there, whether we want it or not - it explains why the software we ship behaves the way it does. So maybe it's worth understanding the language that explains it best.