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Comment by incepted | Hacker News Reader

> If LISP is such an EPIC language why are there no major pushes from LISP community,

The main reason is that the LISP community is just not paying attention to the modern world.

Back in its days, LISP was revolutionary and ahead of its time. It gathered a bunch of followers who could reasonably be justified in thinking their language of choice had something unique about it.

And then, they made a major mistake: they stopped paying attention.

The tech world moved on and passed them. And they ignored it, confident that nothing new or interesting could ever be invented after Lisp.

It's the ultimate hubris: thinking that programming language science can ever reach an end.

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> And then, they made a major mistake: they stopped paying attention.

Nah, the funding just dried up after Cold War ended and symbolic-based AI turned out to be a failure.

> Back in its days, LISP was revolutionary and ahead of its time. It gathered a bunch of followers who could reasonably be justified in thinking their language of choice had something unique about it.

Those "bunch of followers" actually invented half of the programming you use today, and also there were quite a lot of them during the Cold War. The history of computing is not like what C/Java books would like you to believe.

> The tech world moved on and passed them. And they ignored it, confident that nothing new or interesting could ever be invented after Lisp.

Maybe a bit, but for a good reason too. The tech world made a huge step backwards with introduction of Unix and C, and we're only slowly recovering and beginning to pay attention to the things people did before.

> It's the ultimate hubris: thinking that programming language science can ever reach an end.

I agree. But it's also hubris to believe it can not take steps in the wrong direction and enter blind alleys.

> The tech world made a huge step backwards with introduction of Unix and C, and we're only slowly recovering and beginning to pay attention to the things people did before.

When I discovered UNIX via Xenix, I already had ZX Spectrum (48K, 128+2A, 128+3), SAM Coupé, Amiga 500, Windows 3.x experience, so the world of UNIX OS architecture seemed quite interesting.

When I got to learn C, that experience already had showed me there were other means to make use of all computer capabilities.

So the time spent on UNIX land, meant I was initially one of those renegades trying to use C++ instead of C like everyone else.

Eventually the introduction to Smaltalk and Native Oberon spiked my interest to delve into their history, as I was specializing in compiler design.

That showed me a world much more interesting that what AT&T has ever produced.

A saner mentality regarding what computer safety and developer productivity should actually be like, but sadly failed in the market, because UNIX was initially available for free.

I would dare to say that the OS architectures and development stacks from Apple, Google and Microsoft are much closer to those ideas than whatever exists in the pure UNIX world.

You're doing some major revisionism with this post and claiming a lot of completely unsubstantiated (and in my opinion, completely made up) facts.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11699585)

I don't think that's true: I think the language / libraries did evolve, however the things they stopped (or never did) pay attention to; pr & marketing. Common Lisp[0] has a new site now so they are feeling the need, but it needs a lot more; modern videos with modern girls & guys making stuff with it and presenting it.

Ofcourse I long for some of the revolutionary stuff the Lisp community was known for once; particularly a better unified GUI library (I find GUI programming painful because of all the libraries which all do something else 'right'; no-one is doing real revolutionary stuff there) and a better concurrency library. With the knowledge within the community it 'feels' possible to make something for this modern age aka run the same code on AWS Lambda or on a Greenarrays ga144 without changing it.

[0] http://lisp-lang.org/

> they stopped paying attention

I don't think that you've been paying attention to recent Common Lisp libraries or recent lisps. Lisp has never stopped evolving and continues to take ideas from other languages.

Just as other languages continue to take ideas from Lisp!

C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare said of Algol 60 that it was such a good language that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but an improvement on nearly all its successors as well. The spirit of that statement rings true for me[1], and I feel that the same could equally be said of many Lisps, especially when I think of things like read/write, CLOS, streams, conditions, (delimited) continuations, hygienic macros, etc. Common Lisp has been virtually static for over 30 years[2] not because it's "behind the times", but because it was so far ahead of the times that everything else is still playing catch-up!

[1]: I feel as though Algol 60 was, with few exceptions, the best language available until around the mid-to-late 80s.

[2]: Not to mention that it really hasn't been totally static: now we've got ASDF, QuickLisp, {U,C}FFI, CLIM, SLIME, etc. And loads of libraries.

Algol 60 didn't have structured data types, only arrays and numbers. You can't manipulate strings in Algol 60 other than by calling procedures written in another language. It has very strange and problematic procedure call semantics.

Algol 60 was largely superseded in the mid-1960s.

Mind naming a single point where the "tech world" outpaced the Lisp heritage?

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