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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

> And I’ve not seen anything like that in the, albeit casual, contact I’ve had with the Lisp community since then (mostly IRC).

I spent a lot of time in an IRC channel with a Scheme guy who would get mad whenever anyone mentioned JavaScript, because it'd given up its Scheme syntax, and insist on calling it "ECMAScript". I dunno though, that was probably just him.

Most of the internet's experience with Lisp comes from famously abusive people like Stallman and Erik Naggum though. Everyone else decided, like Norvig, that JS and Python were "enough like Lisp".

The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games and the sandbox system in Mac OS X. But both of those left out the garbage collector, which is one of the main things Lisp programmers would always act endlessly superior about.

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The people using trains, buses or cargo trucks managed by Siscog, hardly know they owe their schedules to a Lisp.

Like anyone using Google's travel infrastructure, based on ITA.

Or people who fly on planes built partially using ICad and or Genworks GDL (both Common Lisp) or maintained using Clojure (One of recent~ish airliners has diagnostic packages for maintenance techs done in Clojure)

If referring to TinyScheme being used for sandboxing, that still uses garbage collection.

https://github.com/sungit/TinyScheme/blob/master/tinyscheme-...

GCC also uses garbage collection during the compilation process, but that doesn't make it happen at runtime or C a Scheme.

Okay, cool, but the collector is used at runtime with TinyScheme. _cons calls get_cell calls get_cell_x calls _get_cell calls gc for example; what makes you think otherwise?

The system I'm talking about uses TinyScheme as a code generation system, but doesn't use it as an interpreter in-kernel afaik.

Right. I found <https://www.ise.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apple-sandbox....> which agrees with you (on page 9). Guess it's down to defining "at runtime" now; the TinyScheme code (and GC) and Scheme code for the sandbox definitions are shipped to a user of macOS, and the user can invoke sandbox-exec with new sandboxing definitions (e.g. <https://jmmv.dev/2019/11/macos-sandbox-exec.html>), running TinyScheme and Scheme code. So I'd think Scheme is part of the entire sandbox system, even if not in the kernel?

Sounds like it is not surprising that it does not use a GC at runtime, given that it does not use Scheme at runtime.

>The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games and the sandbox system in Mac OS X

You mean apart from e.g. all Emacs packages, AutoCAD, or, well, HN?

I said "most useful" not "all useful".

…HN isn't that useful.

I find it very useful. Even "most useful". Interacting with it almost daily.

As opposed to Crash Bandicoot?

Yes.

So, Crash Bandicoot is more useful than Emacs or AutoCAD in your scale?

>The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games [...] But both of those left out the garbage collector, which is one of the main things Lisp programmers would always act endlessly superior about.

GOAL was a target DSL in Common Lisp, so garbage collection was still aiding the development.

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