Lisp is amazing. Interesting why Python won the race to become the language of choice for the neural networks wave of AI.
NN in general just boil down to doing lots of linear algebra, which is a lot about mutating very large matrices. For this you really just want a wrapper around BLAS/LAPACK, so you can leverage existing optimized libraries.
Working with matrices in Lisp always feels a bit clunky, and doubly so when you want to do a lot of stateful operations on them. The real compitetor in this space to Python is something like Matlab, which has probably the best interface for doing linear algebra (but is worse at everything else).
The one area where Lisp and Python both shine is the ability to perform automatic differentiation. Lisps are great for this task since it's all symbolic manipulation. However, this is only important once you have a solid interface for working with matrices.
If you want to get a feel for the difference I would suggest reading through the surprisingly excellent The Little Learner. I think you'll find that while it really demonstrates the power of Scheme (Racket in this case) in areas where it excels, you wouldn't want to use the framework in that book for anything other than toy examples.
Lisp can be at least as high level and expressive as any other language.
s-exps are basically coding at the level of the AST, which for many programming tasks is a powerful level of both abstraction and control.
But this interface tends to work much better on tree-like structures (the most simple of which is the list, which in it's simplest case is a cons cell, Lisp's most fundamental particle).
Most programming tasks can boil down to tree manipulation, but large matrices feel a bit out of place with this interface because you are basically to working with arrays (which in it's simplest cases is a pointer to a memory address, which is C's fundamental particle). C like languages (I know, technical ALGO-like), tend to feel more natural for these tasks.
But of course if you can manipulate trees easily, you can manipulate code easily which gives you...
> Lisp can be at least as high level and expressive as any other language.
In practice, for Lisp this is also a weakness. Again, I love Lisps in general, and of course any Lisp and especially Common Lisp (with it's exceptionally excellent macro system) can do anything you want.
However, my (and many others) experience has been that this leads to is it becomes very easy to create code that is amazing for the original developer, but very difficult for new developers to get their head around. Hence the adage "Lisp is optimal for team sizes of one."
You could undoubtable build the worlds most elegant interface to working with matrices in Lisp, but now you essentially have a new language.
[1 2 3; 4 5 6; 7 8 9]
#2A((1 2 3) (3 4 5) (7 8 9))
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
julia> [1,2,3] # An array of `Int`s
3-element Vector{Int64}:
1
2
3
julia> [1:2, 4:5] # Has a comma, so no concatenation occurs.
2-element Vector{UnitRange{Int64}}:
1:2
4:5
julia> [1:2 4:5 7:8]
2×3 Matrix{Int64}:
1 4 7
2 5 8
julia> [[1,2] [4,5] [7,8]]
2×3 Matrix{Int64}:
1 4 7
2 5 8
julia> [1 2
3 4]
2×2 Matrix{Int64}:
1 2
3 4
julia> a=[1 2 5 8 9; 3 4 2 1 33]
2×5 Array{Int64,2}:
1 2 5 8 9
3 4 2 1 33
> You could undoubtable build the worlds most elegant interface to working with matrices in Lisp, but now you essentially have a new language.
What?
Since we're in lisp, you can imagine some macros that make working with matrices easier!
I love Lisp and Smalltalk, but I work as a machine learning researcher as my day job, and I code in Python at work. Admittedly I miss Common Lisp whenever I code in Python, and I think Jupyter notebooks are a poor man’s Smalltalk environment, but when comparing Python to C and C++ (and I used to work primarily in systems programming, so I know my way around C), Python is a major productivity boost.
CERN and Fermilab were adopting Python for Grid Computing (aka Cloud nowadays), already in 2003.
MIT changed SICP from Scheme to Python back in 2006, thus news generations started playing with Python.
Peter Norvig called Python an acceptable Lisp around 2010, in HN. Having written Python for Lisp programmers in 2000.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803351
https://norvig.com/python-lisp.html
What bums me out, is the lack of JIT in the box (yes I know there are some alternatives).
last millennium when google started up, no lisp was a good option. clojure didn't exist, schemes were mostly for teaching, cmucl was in disrepair, and though there were proprietary common lisps, they were proprietary and wanted per-cpu license fees, which would have meant disclosing how many cpus google had—a closely guarded secret
moreover, common lisp's approach of putting a uniform but somewhat repulsive veneer over all operating systems was a pure drawback in google's all-linux environment, and s-expression syntax is harder to read than python's (if easier to edit)
also the python community was friendly and welcoming, while the scheme community was tiny and fragmented, and the common lisp community had degenerated into an ego trip for a world-class asshole named erik naggum
this is guessing from the outside; i've never worked at google, which is why i'm allowed to write this
I just learned today that another new GC for SBCL is in the works, with GC pauses under 100 microseconds.
Python doesn't have a standard, but it has a canonical implementation, so maybe a "defacto standard". Not having an official standard didn't matter, though.
Common Lisp has defacto "standard libraries" for things like threading. Other things, such as async, are less clear (to me), but libraries do exist. Just because something isn't in the standard, though, doesn't mean it can't exist. Also, implementation such as SBCL pick up a lot of the slack, filling in some of the missing gaps.
So much stuff has changed since 2013. Containerization, massive increase in concurrency, mobile platform explosion, etc. Where is the concurrency standard ? Are these 14 CDR's even implemented by CL implementations ? Can't find which CL implementation implements priority queue. Several of those CDR's don't even appear active.