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Comment by dwc

15 years ago

I would like to ask you about this:

    I think we had no fewer than five hairy macros for
    creating complex UI layouts, because everybody wanted
    to do it their own way, and you could hack something
    like that out in an afternoon.

Even though I have worked in commercial environment other than Lisp (never Lisp so far), there are lots of things that can be hacked out in an afternoon. Yet having five hairy sets of duplicated functionality is something I'd never let stand for long. It seems to be a culture thing rather than a language thing. Is that right?

5 comments

dwc

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mtraven  15 years ago

I don't think you can separate language and culture so cleanly.

Oone of the attractions of Lisp is that you can mold the language so its just the way you like it. That makes it harder, sometimes, to have a group come to a consensus about the way things should be. It's just a tradeoff.

As somebody else pointed out recently, highly empowered individuals can be a downside from a management perspective, and that perspective is not entirely wrong, although it's maybe not the way hackers think.

  • kenjackson  15 years ago

    It's just a tradeoff.

    But it's a tradeoff that has left Lisp with one major app in 40 years (Emacs)? A handful of notable apps... and that's it.

    And why, in a space like phones, where one dev can produce an app in a week to months, are there no incredible Lisp applications? This seems like the perfect domain where one to three devs is all it takes to make a world-class app, and theoretically with the awesomeness discussed in the story we would expect at least one Lisp app that was just mind blowing. Of course that hasn't happened.

    IMO, what I think happens are those people who are attracted to Lisp are those who like language purity/elegance and bask in it. They tend to be those that over-attribute the power of a language to the productivity of a developer. They have a great language, and are bright people, yet the result is nothing beyond the normal range of expected output. So they then try to create a rationale that combines their belief that they have a super language, with some odd external force that keeps that language from showing its true power to the outside world. Missing perhaps the most obvious thing which is that in terms of expressability/productivity, language is probably a 1.5x multiplier at best. But if they concede that the multiplier on productivity isn't at least 10x, they may have to admit that the beauty of the language is mostly a form of self-gratification.

  • dwc  15 years ago

    So if I were to learn and use a Lisp and then lure some other non-Lispers I know into a start-up using Lisp, then we would fall into the same problematic cultural patterns? I can see the temptations, but I don't think it would be a forgone conclusion. At least I hope not.

    Thanks for your thoughts, and if you reply again I'll be interested to read it.