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Comment by lilactown | Hacker News Reader

Clojure was my first lisp; I use it every day at work, especially on JavaScript. ;) The (semi-)joke is that the reason Clojure targets the JVM and JS runtimes is so we can get paid to write it.

However, I have started playing with Lisp (SBCL) a bit in my off time and am finding it interesting. I have a desire to write some CLI applications and think Lisp might be a better fit than Clojure. I was drawn to it for a lot of the reasons you note:

1. Native compilation

2. Reader macros

3. C FFI

4. Debugger

But it's also a bit like learning how to write with my left hand; my brain has been warped by Clojure to eschew place-oriented development and reduce mutability to a pinpoint. Lisp is completely, unabashedly mutable (which gives a lot of room for improved performance vs. immutable) and I'm struggling with it.

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One way to use Common Lisp with a more immutable flavour is to use the folio2 library.[0]

I have enjoyed exploring it a great deal. The project's readme, explains it better than I can:

"folio 2 is a collection of small libraries that provide support for functional idioms and data structures in Common Lisp and a common set of APIs for working with them.

"It's a direct descendant of the older and simpler folio library, with a greatly expanded and reorganized API, and support for more data structures and procedures.

[0] https://github.com/mikelevins/folio2

If you want to use functional (immutable) collections in Common Lisp, try FSet [0]. (It's QuickLisp-loadable.) FSet greatly expands the space of programs that can naturally be written in a functional style in CL.

[0] https://github.com/slburson/fset

I have looked heavily at FSet :). I'm at a cross roads now with whether I try and push the Lisp block into the Clojure hole in my brain, or whether I should try and learn Lisp as it is and it's idioms.

FSet is really cool and I'll probably end up using it in conjunction with https://github.com/fiddlerwoaroof/cl-edn

When learning new languages I think it's always beneficial to drink the kool-aid and go as full idiomatic as you can, then step back and reflect once you're competent enough. (That may take a while with CL if you're not doing it professionally, there's a lot in there! I'm still on my own plodding journey to CL competence...) My reasons are for the personal side that doing so should help maximize the "learn new language to change how you think about programming"¹ side-effects and on the social side doing so should help understanding and interacting with other users and code in that community. It can be really frustrating to me when I read Python code written by a career Java developer who never bothered to understand what "Pythonic" is. I don't want to be that guy for someone else.

¹Incidentally this http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h... is my favorite high-level article around one of those potentially mind blowing differences that is Lisp's condition system, written by someone who has spent a lot of time considering fundamentals of programming like what it means to be in an exceptional situation and how to handle it.

It is illuminating to read the output of such minds as Kent Pitman, Dan Weinreb, David Moon, Richard Gabriel, Rodney Brooks, Guy Steele and what they have to say about Common Lisp and the standardization process, in places such as comp.lang.lisp (the entire archive can be found online) and elsewhere. The depth and clarity of thought, the foresight, the attention to detail and the guiding principle of trying to find the "right" vs the "easy" solution (this is beautifully illustrated in "worse is better" by RPG).

Compare and contrast with the designers of today's popular programming languages. There is something severely lacking in the minds behind PHP/Javascript/Python/Ruby and other languages where projected popular appeal and "easy" is the prime design consideration.

Are we worse off? I think so, not just for technical reasons, but because we have lost something greater that can not be easily put into words.

Yes, the evolution of Lisp was guided by brilliant people. I regret throwing out so many of my old Computer Science related books over the years (e.g. the Interlisp Reference Manual) because the few that remain remind me of the history of programming that has occupied so much of my life.

While being nostalgic about the early days of programming languages, I am not as pessimistic about the current state of the art. There were plenty of old programming languages that have faded away despite being important in their day (IBM's PL/1) and lots of work on new languages is pushing in interesting directions (Haskell, Idris).

Common Lisp has hung on and perhaps survivor bias has made it seem special, but to me, it is special. While working with it I feel that I am working with a language of the future from the past.

The landscape of calculation is much bigger than it was half a century ago, when I started programming. It is populated by an enormous ecosystem of processing units from tiny to enormous, embedded to networked across the planet, with single processors to high performance multiprocessors. All of this is controlled by programming and the programmers that wrestle the world of computing into submission. In this Hobbesian ecosystem some languages have prevailed for many years, like Java and C, others have survived even longer like FORTRAN and LISP, and some have simply proliferated rapidly, like Python, all for reasons that are complex and involve human abilities and computer architectures. Not all of them are beautiful, Lisp is, but all of them have a place even if only to reveal what does and doesn't work.

> mind blowing differences that is Lisp's condition system

It's similar mind-blowing when you think about this: that people wrote and used an operating system in the 70s/80s in Lisp, where the condition handling system was in full effect throughout the whole user experience (for example when using the file system, the network, the development environment, etc). With all the pros and cons...

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