Comment by ncmncm

7 years ago

Lisp is the light saber of languages : an elegant weapon for a more (mumble) age. Blasters and death stars are more effective.

Nobody builds anything important with it, but it feels more pure to build toys with it than more practical languages. Some people make big toys.

Nobody is expected to understand anybody else's code, so you can indulge any kind of whim, and it is easy to make any whim work well enough. Meanwhile, the mathematical bedrock of computation outcrops more frequently, so that programs can resemble theorems if you like that.

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ncmncm

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jetti  7 years ago

"Nobody builds anything important with it, but it feels more pure to build toys with it than more practical languages."

  The company I just joined has 99% of their software written in Clojure. Backend is Clojure, front end is ClojureScript. Their software is kind of important to running day to day operations.

  • ncmncm  7 years ago

    "Some people make big toys."

    • jetti  7 years ago

      I would be interested to hear a piece of software that you wouldn't consider a "big toy" or even a "toy" at all. But let's say that software at my company is just a "big toy", it still runs the company's business, that makes it important.

lokedhs  7 years ago

“Nobody” is a bit extreme, don't you think? There are a lot of people building things with Lisp and you're dismissing their work out of hand.

Just one example of a powerful software product written in Lisp: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

(my contribution to this work is a graphical frontend, also written in Lisp: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.dhsdevelopments.Climaxi...)

  • ncmncm  7 years ago

    "Nobody" in the sense that no numbers are rational. You can name lots of them, many of them your best friends, but the probability that a number chosen at random, in any interval, is rational is exactly zero.

    • lokedhs  7 years ago

      That only works in the limit where n tends to infinity.

      I know there is a lot of garbage software out there, and sometimes it does feel like there is an infinite supply of them. But as bad as it is, it's still a finite number.

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flavio81  7 years ago

>Nobody builds anything important with it

The core of grammarly, a major, popular product today, is a Common Lisp program.

  • ncmncm  7 years ago

    You could be arguing that grammarly isn't important.

    But, I say the same about Javascript, Python, and Java, without saying anything nice about them.