<story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Keyframe</author><text>I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).&lt;p&gt;However, I don&apos;t think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.&lt;p&gt;So, what&apos;s the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently  tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn&apos;t have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.&lt;p&gt;Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn&apos;t &quot;get it&quot; - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.&lt;p&gt;Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.&lt;p&gt;tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn&apos;t used more often? Everything I&apos;ve read makes absolutely no sense why it isn&apos;t. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let&apos;s not fool ourselves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/rant&amp;#62;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>I&apos;m not a pro Lisper, but I think reasons offered for this include:&lt;p&gt;* The AI winter (with Lisp, at the time, being seen as &quot;the AI language&quot;)&lt;p&gt;* The heavy-cost and closed nature of the toolchain, and lack of standardization between toolchains, when industry was searching for a language to rally behind several decades ago&lt;p&gt;* The continued lack of standardization on all the &quot;included batteries&quot; when the open source movement was looking for languages to adopt for scripting a decade ago&lt;p&gt;* The deep semantic rabbit-hole a Lisp codebase can turn into when any macro-like functionality is used, meaning that a programmer has to basically learn every project as its own language (that is, DSL) before they can get to work—further meaning that projects grow a sense of individual stewardship/artistic direction, and become harder to work on by hiring committees and one-off contractors&lt;p&gt;* The continued outside impression of Lisps as slow, pure-functional and academic (even though most today are none of those)&lt;p&gt;* The unwillingness for most Lisps to embrace the Unix philosophy (meaning that it&apos;s easier to write a web browser in e-lisp than to loosely couple to one already written in some other language. Clojure is basically the only Lisp that escapes this, cleanly interoperating with the APIs of other languages... on the JVM, which itself throws Unix design principles out the window.)&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure there are more well-founded answers, but all of those came to mind on my road to accepting Lisp.</text></comment>
<story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Keyframe</author><text>I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).&lt;p&gt;However, I don&apos;t think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.&lt;p&gt;So, what&apos;s the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently  tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn&apos;t have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.&lt;p&gt;Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn&apos;t &quot;get it&quot; - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.&lt;p&gt;Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.&lt;p&gt;tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn&apos;t used more often? Everything I&apos;ve read makes absolutely no sense why it isn&apos;t. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let&apos;s not fool ourselves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/rant&amp;#62;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mahmud</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn&apos;t used more often?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will need to bite bullets, take responsibilities and own projects and budgets if you want to use lisp at &quot;work&quot;. I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. It wasn&apos;t always like that; I started as project manager for a tiny but growing PHP codebase. The application domain is both too broad, and also error prone; a large web application &lt;i&gt;platform&lt;/i&gt;. There are both budget and time constraints and corporate buyers are on our ass daily.&lt;p&gt;Between conference calls and discussions with the outsourcing company that was doing our project, I decided to prototype it on the side in CL and see how far I can go. Honestly, I prototyped it just to see if I understood the application domain. The programmers where coming to me on an hourly basis asking questions and it came down to the level where I had to spoon-feed them fully specified PHP classes, well documented API designs and database models. These guys were just typing out my sweat and getting paid for it.&lt;p&gt;I bit the bullet, took full responsibility, looked my boss in the eye and and said it was now MY project.</text></comment>