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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out what specific characteristics give it the kind of reputation it has.

Good observation about Lisp vs. Smalltalk, by the way. (I also wonder why Smalltalk isn't more popular...)

Ok, here I think you need to look at history rather than the languages themselves. Once Lisp (and Smalltalk, for different reasons) became branded as failures, that reputation was fixed in 90+% of people's minds, and it remains so. This is all the more entrenched because of the bias in favor of the newest things in computing. For most people, that a 40-year old failure might be better than something new and popular just isn't possible.

So, you think it's a legacy of the AI winter?

Sure, among other things (like "it's too slow").

That view is remarkably well entrenched. On the last team I worked in, before coming to JTV, we were talking about the big Java project we were working on. I said if I had my way it would have been written in Common Lisp. Many on the team thought that was hilarious. One guy's response was "yeah, maybe if we had a supercomputer!"

For what its worth, that's probably a pretty good sign that they don't really understand what makes languages slow. (Or that they in "cheap shot" mode.)

Weird, as I was browsing the language shootout, I got the impression that SBCL produces damn fast code, in most cases comparable to the code emited by GCC or Java 6.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...

Yeah, that's the point. It's damn fast now. The "too slow" meme is from decades ago.

Notice that you're looking at SBCL 0.9.16

Notice that there are more up-to-date measurements available from the homepage

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

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