alt Hacker NewsI really wish lisps were more popular (or, really, popular again). Most people can't make it past the non-Algol syntax, which is silly IMO. But they do also demand more of the user than a typical language.
Their use of metaprogramming doesn't just allow you to extend the language, it really expects that of the programmer. Which means you have to assume the role of language designer to some extent. Learning how to do that definitely feels like a way to level up your skills. But it seems uncommon for people to want to do that.
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I was really interested in lisps for a couple of years, but eventually I came to the conclusions: it's just hard to read. I know they say "the parens disappear" but even if that is the case, it simply requires you to jump around the expression holding lots of context in your head. I'm a fan of code that mostly reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
I think people underestimate how pragmatic meta programming can be because there are some obvious downsides. Arguably one of things that made Rust so popular was its inclusion of procedural macros.
But beyond that the thing I don't understand about the modern hate towards macros is that they are simply very fun.
Lisp is versatile as all get-out, so you can program however you want. For example, we can roll like it's 1969:
(prog ((a 0)
(b 1)
(c 0))
(declare (type Fixnum a b c))
:fb-start
(print a)
(incf b a)
(setf a
(- b a))
(incf c)
(when (< c 100)
(go :fb-start)))I've been playing around with dropping most of the parens, but keeping the rest.
Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically):
- Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished.
- There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written in Lisp? They're executables at the end of the day so nothing in principle stops this from happening, but there's just a thread of modern Lisp culture where it's more fun to play around in the REPL and write creative libraries than to ship. (There are notable exceptions of course.)
- I personally like the quirkiness of Common Lisp, but there are so many ways to write it (imperative, functional, etc.), so many ways to structure your programs (one package, package per file, package inferred system, etc.), and so many ways to offer APIs (plain old data and functions, generic function protocols, etc.) that it makes it a combination of confusing and intimidating. I think shifting toward something a little more structured and disciplined like Coalton, while still giving the escape hatches to all of Common Lisp, would help a lot of people "join in" on building new code or building upon existing code.
I just really like the homoiconicity.
the "assume the role of language designer" part is underrated. even if you never ship production lisp, writing a toy interpreter changes how you think about every other language you use. suddenly you understand why certain design decisions were made, not just what they are.
i wrote a tiny scheme evaluator as a learning exercise and it was probably the best investment of a few weekends i've ever made as a programmer.
> But it seems uncommon for people to want to do that.
It becomes more obvious once you start managing developers vs being a solo dev. everyone making their own designer means the language can morph into a completely insular creation with a learning curve that expands exponentially with every new hire. A little extra boilerplate is the cost of standardized idioms that work across both your codebase that your new hires are already familiar with from working in that language at other companies. its why go was created. personally I prefer rust and elixir as good middle grounds.