alt Hacker NewsLisp is aesthetics now. I used to appreciate the way in which its constructs gave the ordinary programmer considerably more reach. It made programming fun, the way I could talk directly to a running system and extend its functionality outwards with a minimum of boilerplate, procedures and data chasing each other's tails in a kind of neverending ouroboros.
But the fact is, whatever productivity gains I may have gained in Lisp are absolutely dwarfed by those gained by using an LLM. I have literally seen LLMs pointed at a problem, solve it almost instantly. And LLMs do better the more popular the programming language you're working in. So what's the point of choosing Lisp? Oh, your feeble human brain can understand the problem and craft a solution much more quickly and in a flow state without being bogged down by tedium? That's nice. Claude Code can understand the problem and craft a solution without you even being in the room. It's a cheat code. It's iddqd. It's "pay to win" for what used to be the challenging, demanding, and fun game of programming.
And Lisp went from being "still kinda the best programming language ever" to a retrocomputing curiosity almost overnight. There is no practical reason to start a new project in Lisp in 2026.
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The unfettered instrumental rationality of the techno-slob on full display. Bonus depravity-points if the multi-paragraph HN comments are also being outsourced to the Machine.
Depending on a corporation to do your programming (and burning half the planet in the process, pardon the hyperbole) is the very opposite end of the "hacker" ethos where Lisp stands. Very surprising to see this sort of comment on HN, of all places.
Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.
I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.
Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.
Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.
The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.
Can your LLM do that to a running system? Or will it have to restart the whole program to run the next iteration? Imagine you build something with long load-times.
Also, your Lisp will always behave exactly as you intended and hallucinate its way to weird destinations.
High level programming languages were conceived by humans and for humans. Will AIs in future better use their own languages, or maybe even output machine language directly?
You are comparing a PL to a text generator. What are you on?
We have enough headlines about LLMs already. Let's just enjoy a cool Lisp site without some AI advocate telling us that non-AI things are irrelevant.