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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

If we randomly sample no-longer-used languages, I suspect we will see infix support more often than not. Infix won't save a language.

> fact many people believe programs in Lisp syntax are hard to read.

It's not a fact; it's just a couple of trolls, plus people just repeating what they have heard. People who reply to "lisp" with "lots of irritating silly parentheses" haven't necessarily even tried to read any examples of Lisp; they are just repeating a joke they heard.

Just like how people who say "fix it again, Tony" when they hear "Fiat", who have never driven a Fiat, and have no idea about the statistics of Fiat reliability relative to other makes of car.

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It might just boil down to the fact that programs of some complexity in almost any language are hard to read, even more so when you're a beginner in said language and might not even know its coding/formatting conventions...

PS: The Part regarding Fiat is interesting, because we have a similar saying in Germany, namely: "Fehler in allen Teilen", which translates to "Errors in every part".

I have really no idea about the statistics about fiat reliability though, so don't take that as a statement from me^^

Some things stay "true" even long after they are not. Lisp is also unbearably slow... as compared to C on 1979 microcomputers.

Lisp is pretty slow in comparison to C, that's acceptable.

As a quick self test stand up a C http server using gnu microhttp, hit it with AB or Wrk.

Next stand up a http server in sbcl (e.g. using wookie) and do the same AB or Wrk load test.

If you are expecting common Lisp to come close to C or even JVM you will be quite disappointed.

I know I was.

I love Lisp but it's a unwise to compare it with C on performance.

What.

I do entirely expect SBCL to come within factor of 2 to C (if you instrument your Lisp code with type declarations properly), and definitely to get JVM performance. And even unoptimized CL code I expect to run faster than Ruby, Python or JS.

Modern CL implementations are good, and the language itself gives you plenty of ways to help the program compile down to efficient native code.

> Lisp is pretty slow in comparison to C, that's acceptable.

It is not. (Common) Lisp can be made as fast as C if you really need it, by using tricks...

By the way, for a while, the fastest HTTP static server was one written in Lisp, "teepeedee2", 2009. Fastest in the world.

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