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Comment by iLemming

2 days ago

> programming has matured quite a bit

Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no?

Clojure, Clojurescript, Clojure-Dart, Fennel, Jade, Jank, Jolt, Coalton - these are relatively recent (and still developing) languages, and this is just off the top of my head, there are so many more.

Lisp is not a programming language (in a sense), it's an idea. It influenced pretty much every single PL we use today and continues to do so. You can't really "level-heatedly" criticize an idea, it's like criticizing I dunno, group theory. You can though debate about merits of a specific implementation of it.

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iLemming

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throwaway81523  2 days ago

> Your wording sounds like it implies that Lisp "got stuck" somewhere in the past, no?

Pretty much. See pg's famous "Blub Paradox" where he sees Lisp as the top of a tower of lesser languages. He doesn't recognize that Lisp might at best be called a limit ordinal, to use math jargon. That is, Lisp is just another Blub, and the Lisp zealots haven't figured that out.

You don't necessarily want to keep going further and further up, of course. Lisp still has fascination. But e.g., in Common Lisp (I mean just the stuff in the CL spec, no ad-hoc extensions allowed) you can't write anything resembling an OS. You can in Scheme, using continuations to handle process switching.

Going further up, Lisp doesn't make it easy to ensure the absence of particular behaviours in a program, what TAPL calls the purpose of a type system. Tony Morrison has a semi-realistic example of what static types can get you:

http://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-de...

Link still works but TLS certificate expired in 2025, tsk tsk.

  • hajile  2 days ago

    Your lisp criticism is orthogonal to the idea of lisp itself. Lisps like Coalton (lambda calculus) or Shen (sequent calculus) are strongly typed.

    AI is an interesting point too where being closer to a raw AST is likely an advantage because it can focus more on the semantics instead of the syntax.

    • throwaway81523  2 days ago

      You can wrap parentheses around anything and call it Lisp, but I specified Common Lisp and pg's article clearly wasn't contemplating anything like Shen. Surface syntax is near irrelevant though.

      2 replies →

  • iLemming  1 day ago

    pg's notion was psychological, not about languages per se: a programmer sitting in language X can't perceive power above X, only below. It's about a fixed vantage point.

    Your "Lisp is just another Blub" would be true if Lispers were stuck looking up from Lisp-as-it-was and failing to see higher. If Lispers were trapped in the Blub position, they couldn't have deliberately imported ideas that sit "above" classic Lisp. But they keep adapting: Clojure added persistent immutable data structures; brought CSP/channels; introduced structural contracts like Spec and Malli. With Coalton and Shen they are explicitly reaching for the static-types level you say they can't see. Racket's whole "language-oriented programming" perhaps a level above any perceived Blub.

    Maybe what you see ain't a Lisp ceiling? Could it be that some powers must live in the substrate - and Lisp's distinctive traits are precisely what makes building that new substrate cheap?

gf000  1 day ago

What idea? S-expressions?

Because that's all these languages share. What's common in CL and Clojure? They are as dissimilar as C and Scala.

  • iLemming  1 day ago

    > What's common in CL and Clojure?

    homoiconicity, macros, functional bias, REPL - to count just a few.