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Comment by hevi_jos | Hacker News Reader

IMHO It is.

It is like Windows. When it appeared it was significantly inferior to Unix options, but it made a hundred or a thousand times more people to experience computers.

If a 1 to 10 percent of people is naturally innovative and creative, then the platform with most users ends innovating way more.

Lisp use at first was restricted only to Academics, it was so inefficient that you even required a very special(and expensive) purpose computer to run it. Those academics were not paying the machine with their paycheck so they didn't care.

More affordable solutions like c became popular and forced Lisp to improve(creating compilation pathways and so on), when it was obvious everyone was using the c toolchain(c++, objc, java).

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> Lisp use at first was restricted only to Academics

Lisp was spreading in the 60s to everyone who had a mainframe or mini computer. In the 70s first applications were built and companies like BBN, Xerox, IBM started to use Lisp. In the 80s Common Lisp was standardized upon a DARPA initiative to have a single Lisp language for the applications they were prototyping or deploying in the military. The military got huge applications for battle management, battle simulation&training (like SIMNET), planning, design & construction developed by contractors.

> it was so inefficient that you even required a very special(and expensive) purpose computer to run it

Lisp developers required a personal workstation and thus they co-invented them in the 70s. Machines with 1 Megabyte or more RAM for a single user. Machines where one could develop and work with programs like Macsyma, an early computer algebra system widely used in maths and physics.

> creating compilation pathways and so on

efficient execution of Lisp on non-special-purpose hardware was available in the 70s for example with Maclisp and in the 80s with Common Lisp.

Definition of "innovative":

    Characterized by the creation of new ideas or things

Popularity isn't innovation by its definition. These two issues are orthogonal.

>> "It is like Windows ... but it made a hundred or a thousand times more people to experience computers."

Right, but that's completely irrelevant and not innovation.

"Innovative" is a great example of an aircraft-carrier-clearance word. The way this word is used in e.g. startup context, popularity can absolutely be innovative - after all, if Lisps were not popular, and now one suddenly is, it's a new thing therefore innovative (send funding rounds this way please).

Honestly, I think the word "innovation" needs to be tabooed from the discussion to get meaningful questions and answers.

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