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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

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We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p

Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

> Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Yeah, that, uh, doesn't sound like Lisp

https://guix.gnu.org/

Yeah, I mean, I know it exists, but the mythology of Lisp is built around "I can drop into a REPL and execute arbitrary code on a production system and that is a good thing"

As opposed to our wonderful world where everyone does the same with unchecked binaries or obfuscated/minified JS?

To me the mythology of lisp (from my mostly outsider perspective) is more like "make everything a interoperable DSL" (although if this is what you were describing with your sentence then thats fair enough)

You can with Guix, just save your config in a new deployment for a new boot.

Common lisp isn't functional in that sense.

Sure the language might not be immutable but the lisp machine alt universe's "overton window" would I imagine be more functional then today's (JVM? maybe that's the qnalog?) reality.

When I learned (Common) Lisp at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1995, we were encouraged to make as many functions as possible purely functional, and if mutation was needed, to try to hide it within the bounds of a function.

So while Lisp may not be purely functional, the culture hewed that way.

That's interesting, because I had the opposite experience. I started getting into Lisp around 2004, but bounced off of the community because the culture I was experiencing hewed heavily toward imperative code and global variables in the name of efficiency.

I specifically remember the breaking point being third-party library where none of the functions had any parameters. Instead, everything was controlled by using dynamic binding to adjust the variables within the functions. Various forum members kept praising its beauty and elegance, but I found it needlessly confusing.

I have a soft spot for the Lisp family of languages. I've been using Emacs for almost thirty years and have used both Scheme and Clojure in production. However, my experiences back in 2006 have left me with a permanent bias against Common Lisp.

Common Lisp is pretty much the opposite of what people think of as functional nowadays. You're constantly changing the image and everything is mutable.

Image saving isn't something that's done very often, in practice.

What is done in practice, for daily development use? Building the image in memory from source files at startup?

Typically, for development, one will start a clean image in the morning and load it up with a combination of newly compiled code and automatically cached previously compiled code. This is mostly invisible to the user unless something goes wrong with the cache and it has to be cleared. The unaware user could think they're recompiling everything every time.

Yes, that's quite fast. The files are kept in a version control system so you update from that first as well.

The use cases for images would be: delivery of applications to users, or (internally) delivery of some fixed set of underlying code that is used as a substrate for development but that wouldn't normally be changed by developers.

Normally, the developer has an image running all day, and does development and testing in it, but (unless needed for additional testing) doesn't save that image as a new binary that others can run.

I would presume there was a lot of mixing of imperative/functional in the 80s where this alt universe starts. I think the same type of world in which lisp machines would have become king would also be similar

yeah it's a strange aspect of that lisp era, it was born in mccarthy's recursive functions over recursive lists.. and then interactive development over global state added as a layer.

i would argue that lispers use of mutability was much more surgical and principled but maybe i'm biased

McCarthy's pure Lisp existed only on paper. The first Lisp that ran on a computer had mutable variables, as did Lisp 1.5, Maclisp, etc...

Immutability requires lots of copying and early computers didn't have much memory to spare...

fair point but from memory most of early programs in his paper were purely immutable in nature (tree recursion and substition), right ?

Yes but he also wrote this when describing the language:

> In addition to the facilities for describing S-functions, there are facilities for using S-functions in programs written as sequences of statements along the lines of FORTRAN (4) or ALGOL (5). These features will not be described in this article

hmm funny i completely missed that, i thought these traits were introduced a bit later

Yeah, all the common lispers I know are all about interacting with "live" programs as opposed to "dead", compiled ones. Nix takes the last live, mutable, reflectable part of the world of programmers today, the OS itself, and turns it into a dead program as well. So common lispers tend to hate Nix with a passion (as do Smalltalk users).

i'm a lisper, and i don't hate nix. i prefer guix, for sure, but i don't see this hatered you're talking about among other lispers either.

That (deployment is via a customized image) is the thing I find most awkward.

Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it's not widely known/used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot's "SOS Interface" for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep:

https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory...

I'd dearly love to see a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool using LISP w/ a nifty UI for working up a GUI which would compile to something easily deployed (maybe HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript) as a stand-alone/single-file web application?

You probably want Clog: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

Clog is very cool. As an alternative, I have recently been building Common Lisp UIs with webview (I have two example webview apps as recent additions to my Common Lisp book).

re: heap based delivery: not a good idea. But, I sometimes do heap based development when I have a ton of data I want loaded every dev session, then I save a SBCL image, and restart my Lisp environment using my custom image.

Docker deploys is a bit like that I think. Overall, I think many languages and programming systems pick up pieces from each other nowadays. PHP almost by accident can be quite stateless. Yet it's looking more like Java. Many things which could be deployed as an executable, are deployed as VM images. I'm sure we can come up with more things...

sbcl can compile to a single executable (the image is embedded in the binary). From a deployment standpoint, the only real issue is if you depend on a dynamically linked C library like OpenSSL.

I used to do this to build command line utilities in SBCL, with millisecond initialization times. Good technique, and compress the image so executables are fairly small.

random note: it's possible to incorporate C libs at compile time, e.g.:

https://github.com/sionescu/sbcl-goodies

Yeah, I’ve done that in a slightly hacky way (manually run the various stages of the sbcl build and statically link c libs before building the actual image).

That would be a bad idea. In Smalltalk the "image" was the main thing and I think that was one thing that led to the commercail demise of Smalltalk. You can not combine two (or more) images. You can not build new things by using "images" as components. Instead as we know source-code modules with well-defined interfaces between them is what keeps productivity hhigh. At least before AI.

Images can be saved out as files, so I don't see why not. Also, I recall it was the expensive commercial licensing along with the rise of cheap PCs as competition to Lisp and ST machines. That and Java being free with a focus on networking and the web was the final nail in squashing Lisp or ST popularity.

March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...

September 1991 — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95."

(Advert on the last page of "The Smalltalk Report")

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor...

Good pointers. But Claude Code is even more expensive.

Back in the day those were not unusual costs for programming tools. (Beer wasn't free.)

There's no such thing as free beer

Java being free-as-in-beer.

> You can not combine two (or more) images.

Depends what you mean. Details matter.

> You can not build new things by using "images" as components.

Depends what you mean. Details matter.

I've often thought that s-expression diff-viewers would be very nice tooling. I've also often wondered how easy it would be to just sling s-expressions across the wire to execute in another environment. What would modern infrastructure look like if you could just have lambdas running lambdas?

in at least Common Lisp world slinging s-expressions is considered to be a hack, at best something you do in a development environment, like swank/slime wire protocol. one of the reasons is that a readtable is both powerful, user extendable, and has all kinds of default ways in which a malicious input would be detrimental. you can remove all kinds of reader macros like #.(xyzzy), but to make a truly bulletproof s-expression reader you'd have to build a json like subset from first principles. even things like colons in symbol name package:symbol will trip you up. it's been understood since long time ago, that common internet standards, like RFCs, are the preferred method. in which case the fact that it's an s-expression versus a json is pretty much irrelevant. it's a kind of reader/writer anyway.

You can configure (read) to be safe for this purpose.

It’s not a hack.

Yes, there's a specific standard special variable controlling it, *read-eval*.

You can also configure a read table to disable any other data structure features you want.

inb4 DoS attack. That is a universal parsing problem and should be solved by configuring OS limits for your process.

I'm of two minds about read tables.

Yes, it's nice we have control over it. This is a lisp thing, where features that are used to implement standard things (like the standard reader) are exposed so the user can play with them also.

But code written with custom read tables has some problems. Different code with different read tables may not be composable. If I have two packages that use incompatible read tables I can't import them into a third package and expect to be able to use their readtables there.

Also, it makes treating code as an object to be inspected, modified, and written out again difficult. This is similar to the problem of code rewriting systems on preprocessed languages like C or C++.

A different branch of Lisp put everything into S expressions. Interlisp, for example, had comments in the code as forms, so the code could be editted as S-expressions. But that was dropped from Common Lisp, which took the surface syntax more from Maclisp.

Good points. I sometimes see it as “easy and clean json” rather than code as data.

Not sexps, but better.

Quite a while back I have read about a system based on Scheme , called termite (I don't remember which scheme that was) that can actually sling live running code/closures across network and execute them remotely..

Boggles my mind even today.

Probably this?

“Concurrency Oriented Programming in Termite Scheme”: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/09-germain.pdf

Implemented in Gambit Scheme: https://github.com/FredericHamel/termite-scheme

Erlang also has this capability built in. You can do all kinds of weird stuff with it, it’s great.

Tcl has a library called "comm" [0] that lets you expose an interpreter over a socket and since everything in Tcl has a string representation, there's no need for a serialization/deserialization step.

[0] https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcllib/doc/trunk/embedded/md/tclli...

The worst thing that ever happened to Common Lisp was its ANSI standardization, which for many years killed almost all language innovation and improvement.

The worst and best thing.

Nobody stopped anyone to come up with variants, just from calling those ANSI Common Lisp compliant. There are after all many, most of which are long dead already.

On the other hand, standardization enabled Common Lisp implementations to actually be tested, so programs became much more portable across time and between different implementations.

What stopped further development of the standard was the collapse of the market for Common Lisp.

I should note that many of the things that need changes to the language definition in other languages are just libraries in Common Lisp.

But _worse is better_.

> How would a kubernetes

We have a few services built in Clojure and we expose nrepl port on our pods in our SDEs, it's enormously helpful to test and debug things on the fly, without having to redeploy or restart anything. Without having to deal with state, caching, etc.

Not In production yes?

Also not sure what is SDE.

No, of course not in prod. SDE stands for "Software Developer Environment" - ephemeral VMs we spin up for testing before stuff hits staging/prod clusters.

For non-LISP languages on k8s, you have Tilt (https://tilt.dev/) or Skaffold (https://skaffold.dev/) nowadays to support continuous development.

> How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like

I imagine it would look a bit like Erlang's BEAM. No need to stop and start the application, but write a script to do hot updates of a live image.

if you are pondering about that, then i think you'll like this:

https://ngnghm.github.io/

Not that different.

AWS already has lots of AMI and docker are essentially image based.

We would version whole images in something like git, and that's all.

Uhm. I can think of more differences

We would skip attrocity of JavaScript, JSON and XML.

Variable AWS is unbound.

It'd look like Graal, which is a real thing you can use today.

Same as the regular, but configurable in lisp?

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work.

I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language.

The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.

Racket's theme of being a "programming language for building programming languages" is just the poster child of this naivety: I don't want even more friction.

What scales and works is simple and boring.

That's by the way why also Haskell has struggled forever. Beyond its dreadful DX, poor tooling and unacceptable compilation times, the language is just plagued by compiler extensions and every single developer reinventing its own abstractions.

There was the simple haskell movement to just standardize around a set of extensions and conventions, but nope, these languages unavoidably attract people that want to stay in the ivory tower.

Really, I love both lisps and haskell, but I would take a dreadful php over them every single day at work. No contest.

I use Common Lisp at work.

Me too

Jealous of both of you

do you guys need a sweeper, janitor, someone to go fetch coffee or something?

>> said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work.

Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work.

edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!

>FWIW, at a FAANG!

Do you work on ITA? Only FAANG I'm aware of using Lisp is Google.

Nope not on ITA. I work at the intersection of HW and SW. Lisp is valued for its strengths and I haven't come across any tool better to explore complex problem space. Of course, the opportunities are fewer, get filled up organically and are better suited for someone with valuable domain knowledge who can translate it into working space for a wider team using Lisp as the tool to write the spec!

Sounds like a dream job, tbh

You hiring? Sounds like a dream. Dead serious.

Sorry, not hiring currently but rest assured I've bookmarked this comment and will reach out when we do.

I'm an IC and have three more engineers working alongside, so a very small team.

We don't expect anyone we're hiring to know, understand or have even heard of Lisp :-), just the curiosity and willingness (which we evaluated in the interviews) to grok it when provided enough support and runway to get upto speed.

As you seem to be keen for such a job, the best bet right now is start using SBCL in your daily work. Trick: don't say you're using Lisp just show (the output), don't tell!

> The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.

Have you like looked at anything in the Clojure ecosystem because this description makes no sense of any kind. Clojure has macros but less powerful than common lisp and Clojure code in the ecosystem tends to be small and understandable.

It seems to me the Clojure community internalized the lesson of not writing macros unless it's really necessary more than other Lisps did.

I believe the real issue is that Scheme, which was (through university) often the first and last contact of people with Lisp family languages, has greatly exaggerated case of "everyone reinventing the wheel", and that's before you get into educational reasons that led to people seeing very limited view of Scheme

So does the community of every other dialect (Common Lisp, at least). Write a function if you don't have to write a macro, and maybe declaim the function to be inlined.

The "Lisp Curse" is a ridiculous and tired myth that can only be invented by people who have looked at the language for 5 seconds and went straight to finding an excuse to not learn it.

Is it? I saw macros and went mad with power. I wrote a macro that could have been a function today.

But seriously, I think Clojure has a particularly strong tradition of writing clean, readable code.

Clojure is actually an interesting case here, because it is hosted. So, you can write a Clojurescript macro that runs at compile time on the JVM, but emits code that runs at runtime in Javascript, e.g. instead of blindly loading and executing some JS lib code, your macro can first parse it, analyze it, and conditionally emit Cljs that changes the runtime behavior.

Use-cases for code that writes code across a host boundary are rare, yet enormously useful and really difficult to achieve without homoiconic nature of the language.

Hyperfiddle/Electric is a nice project that effectively utilizes the idea.

Further confirming my point on why it is the only lisp with some genuine traction out there.

I think you have very little insight to what you're talking about. The modern Lisp landscape is nothing like what it was in the 90s or even 2000s. The amount of practical shit Lispers been quietly building these days is genuinely impressive.

Have you ever seen GitHub language stats? Elisp there in the list a few points behind Lua, Elixir, OCaml and Haskell. The amount of Emacs Lisp on GitHub alone should be at least surprising. There's so much Elisp in the wild - the amount of it probably exceeds Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And let me remind you that it isn't a "general-purpose PL" - it's meant for one and only purpose.

Look at the number of package for AI-coding in Emacs¹ - 35 and counting. Mind that emacs has no central curated marketplace with the same discoverability as VSCode's. Packages live across MELPA, GNU/NonGNU ELPA, and countless personal repos, so a hand-counted 35 from a Reddit roundup is almost certainly an undercount of what exists in the wild.

And that's just one of the observable axes of Lisp. Anyone can join Clojurians Slack and scroll through #news-and-articles, just out of curiosity. It is hard to find a problem space today or a runtime where Lisp has not proliferated. Why? Because Lisp is enormously practical. Just because you convinced yourself it isn't, doesn't change a thing about reality.

---

¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1uwm3c0/the_state_of...

It's mostly hobbyism.

My point stands.

> My point stands.

Your point can stand, sit or jump around in a circle - makes no difference. Any ignorant fool can make a hollow point about things they don't fully understand and congratulate themselves in the process.

You can make similar "observation" about Linux on Desktop, mechanical keyboards, 3D printing and Raspberry Pi/Arduino tinkering and call them "hobby business".

You're essentially conflating "niche" with "unserious". By that logic Linux was a hobby OS and Git a hobby VCS - both literally started as one guy's side project, both now run the industry. Lisp is niche, not unserious: Clojure runs Nubank, Walmart, Cisco and Apple; Common Lisp ran ITA/Google Flights; and most of the features in whatever your favorite language is were Lisp ideas first.

I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a Lisp-based project, there would be project standards (like no exported macros without signoff, and a list of standard library dependencies), documentation requirements, and code review.

The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn't mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.

One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio's Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.

The problem is that the type of developer you're talking about is the kind who invents a thousand excuses about anything. It doesn't begin and end with different languages. Using a different subset of their favorite language? A different toolchain? A radically different build process? You'll hear plenty of whining about it. Even just moving them to a different codebase will make them miserable. You put a Lisp or a Prolog in front of them, and their attention flows upwards to the most general principles to whine about. The entire thing is that if you stick them into an unfamiliar environment, they will vocalize their discomfort through rationalization. I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Not that these people are necessarily bad at their jobs, but they're definitely a personality type you should learn to identify so you can manage them properly.

Yes, that kind of developer exists everywhere, but is still limited by the tools you reign in him.

> I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I'm talking about.

I've had those as leads themselves, with great benefit and pain. They further convinced me about the beauty of ugly and boring.

You clearly and obviously have little or none of practical, genuine experience working with experienced Lispers, and driving your opinions from a book-read definitions rather from actual, battle-tested work.

Your line up of Lisp and Haskell next to one another is already telling - the two cultures can't be more different. Haskell culture historically have selected for people who enjoy theory for its own sake. Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude.

> What scales and works is simple and boring.

Java was exotic in 1996 and boring by 2006. If "boring" just means "widely adopted and familiar", then your notion just collapses to "what's popular is popular". True and absolutely pointless and empty.

I reckon, you're piggybacking on Dan McKinley's "Choose Boring Technology", but his point was that the innovation tokens are scarce. That is a good and true argument. But it's about organizational risk budgets, not language virtue. It says nothing about Haskell or Lisp being bad or impractical - it says being different is expensive, and you'd better be buying something with that expense. I personally disagree with that argument (in this case), because I have effectively proven that Lisp's bus factor is much smaller than even of Python or JS/TS, because modern Lisp dialects are far simpler and less convoluted and easier to train into. The experience difference and angle of opinions of two Python/JS experts can be dramatic. Having two Lispers talking "the same" language is far more plausible in practice. Not to mention that ROI from hiring a practicing Lisper (regardless of the business stack) more likely to exceed of a programmer without such knowledge.

Let me remind you that Python was considered a niche scripting toy at some point when it was the same age of [niche] Clojure today. It got boring by riding two waves that had nothing to do with the language design: web (Django/Flask) and then, decisively, being in the right place and time when scientific computing and ML needed a glue language.

Boring things survive by mass, inertia, and being unremarkable - COBOL endures because ripping it out of banks is too expensive, not because anyone loves it. Lisp survives by being remarkable - by smaller population who see the thing the majority can't, regenerating the flame across dialects out of conviction, not inertia.

What scales and works is boring, that is true. Lisp is not that, never will be, and doesn't care. What has enduring value survives regardless of adoption - that is Unix, SQL, lambda calculus itself. I'm sure you won't be arguing that any of these are impractical. Anyone can wholeheartedly accept every new rising and falling, boring COBOL and chase every new hype cycle, or just quietly keep feeding on truly everlasting ideas. Or, like in my case, nothing stands in your way of combining both - I use plenty of boring languages at work, and efficiently utilize Lisp for my personal computing. Because the darn thing just fucking works!

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude.

SICP tells me otherwise.

SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on to CS as a discipline.)

SICP, as beautiful and good as it is, is probably responsible for a large amount of the misconceptions and negative thoughts about Lisp. SICP isn't a Lisp book, it's a Scheme book, and the Scheme culture is at least as different to Lisp (Common Lisp and its ancestors all the way back to McCarthy) as Java is to Python.

I know both CL and Scheme, thanks. And both philosophies overlap a lot. Heck, there's an Scheme interpreter in PAIP as en exercise...

I'd woudn't consider SICP negative, the same with all the good CL books (Intro to Symbolic Computation, Paradigms of AI Programming...)

Both are the ur-examples on how to grasp the basic of CS well.

Are you using a 42 year old book to find flaws in my argumentation? Let's talk real, contemporary numbers.

NuBank: from ~12M customers in 2019, grown to 25M in a year, then to 48M at IPO a year later, then to 114M in 2024, to 131M in 2025 - 991.67% growth within 6 years and still going. Not in theory, not conceptually, not because "SICP has told them". They did get-the-shit-done. Not acknowledging that Datomic and Clojure has something to do with this succes would be simply a dishonest gesture.

Walmart - the canonical "Clojure at scale" story. The eReceipts system processed every purchase across 5,000+ US stores plus online/mobile, built and maintained by just 8 developers. Architect Anthony Marcar's line after Black Friday: the system "handled its first Walmart Black Friday and came out without a scratch". They cited 5-10x less code than alternatives.

Apple - known for using Lisp for a long time.

Metabase - open-source BI. ~46k GitHub stars.

Amperity - customer data platform, "99% Clojure" - their own quote.

Netflix - been using Clojure since forever. Watch their talk from the last year's Conj. It's eye-opening on stability of complex systems.

Cisco - malware analysis platform. Multiple huge Clojure projects: IROH - Incident Response Orchestration Hub, CTIM/CTIA - Cisco Threat Intelligence Model and API, etc.

Braintree/PayPal - payments backend. CircleCI. Grammarly (this guys are on SBCL)

And that's just a short list of actual, real, profitable businesses built with and maintained using Lisp. I don't know what "SICP has told" you, but maybe you just need to look around, things have changed a bit since then.

I mean, both Scheme and CL have good libraries and a set of standards.

Okay, but what that has to do with preferring strong CS theoretical grounds vs. cutting corners to get-the-shit-done?

My initial point was about cultures - Haskelites are typically very smart, extremely mathy, and they'd often choose certain ways even if it takes them forever and requires reading and analyzing dozens of academic papers, just because "Galois was a genius and we can make this theory fit here, because then we can center infinite divs on infinitely large DOM entities...", then publishes a paper "Coequalizers for Vertical Alignment: A Comonadic Approach"

A Lisper would be like: "Ahem... I wrapped the whole thing in a macro. Yes, it evals a string. Yes, the string is generated by another macro. No, I will not be explaining it. It shipped Tuesday, it prints money, it works. Gotta go, kids need dinner.."

You forgot about HAKMEM under PDP10 assembly/ITS/MacLisp/Macsyma (these three/four ovelapped)

So, Haskell people smart, other people dumb?

Also, where do you go from "preferring strong CS theoretical grounds" to "cutting corners"? They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

That garbage collection that Haskell has? Guess where that came from. The whole "functions as data to pass around", guess where that came from. It was those pesky lispers on a Tuesday.

Edit: typo

> Haskell people smart, other people dumb?

Da hell you're talking about, friend? I said nothing about "people", or them being smart or dumb; just a difference in cultural stereotypes.

Now you're ironically "proving the point" I didn't make by saying some dumb shit and pulling me into this pit too. If I was actually smarter I'd probably just ignored it. Reminds me Billy Madison quote: "everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

>cultural stereotypes.

Again, check HAKMEM from ITS/Maclisp/PDP10's (The OS from Richard Stallman took all the ideas for GNU Emacs, the GPL license, the free software movemement and whatnot). Lisp itself accounts for tons of papers and innovation.

I was fortunate enough to use lisp professionally for nearly 20 years. The only reason that gig ended was the unfortunate demise of the majority owner and founder, and his heirs selling the shop to a competitor that only wanted the customer database imported. Lisp was never the problem, nor particularily messy.

On the contrary, we considered it a major reason we were able to build a quite successful stock broker and bank from scratch with a team of 4-6 people, who doubled as datacenter ops (we ran on-prem), internal tech support for the rest of the firm (~20 people) and 2.line customer support.

We quite naturally converged on a set of internal libraries for various tasks. Understanding and fixing each other’s code was not a big deal.

Coincidentally, our frontend was php. That was messier, and we conciously kept that layer as lean as possible.

I have a complete and utterly opposite experience. I have used and shipped all sorts of solutions in dozens of different languages before getting to know Lisp. My only regret is that I have not tried learning Lisp sooner - it feels like such a walloping waste of my life.

Lisp dialects turned out to be extremely practical - I just can't even imagine doing the things I do today with Emacs in anything else. Achieving similar effects with any other tool would be enormously more time consuming and far more frustrating. Sure, it really took me years to get to that point, but even though I had already knew all sorts of other tools which I could've picked to achieve similar results - from bash/zsh, awk, sed and tcl to python, golang and a bunch of others, the way Lisp-driven Emacs lets me get there is beyond meaningful comparison. Nothing even comes close and I'm enormously proficient in vim, I spent almost a decade in IntelliJ and used tons of different IDEs before - from Delphi and Eclipse to Visual Studio and VSCode.

Clojure, at which I scoffed at some point, turned out to be an immensely pragmatic tool for dealing with data. Any kind of data - big or small. It effectively replaced jq in my toolbelt, all my API interrogations happen in a Clojure REPL today. Fetching data from psql, mysql, sqlite and sorting, slicing, dicing, transforming that data interactively, directly from my editor is an absolute delight.

Building simple web-scraping scripts with nbb driving Playwright is so much faster than using any other stack, even javascript is no longer "an obvious choice" for me, even though I spent decades learning its quirks.

Babashka has replaced any kind of bash-scripting - anything longer than three lines almost has no reason to be made in bash/zsh/fish anymore.

Anything Lua-driven is now done with Fennel. It's not even funny how a dozen-lines boilerplate of Lua can be compacted into a simple, reasonable three-liner Fennel macro. Or the way how I can connect to the Hammerspoon REPL and poke through visual elements of any app on Mac, interactively and with ease - is complete and total bananas.

Era of LLMs incidentally highlighted another enormous advantage of Lisp - when you give an LLM a true Lisp REPL, agents stop guessing and start empirically analyzing current state of things and produces working solution faster, costing far less tokens. And you get to watch it solve things interactively, e.g. I often let AI poke through our UI (via Playwright-driven Clojurescript REPL), while monitoring situation in k8s - through nrepl port, connected to Clojure REPL. It literally interactively walks the DOM, finds the selectors, clicks buttons, etc. All without restarts, complex state management and all.

"Well", you may say: "these examples exactly what I'd consider a 'hobby language' territory".

Alas, I have worked in teams where Clojure was used for shipping commercial software and I have seen truly complex projects - Cisco's infosec infrastructure and FindingCircle's complex Kafka topologies. I have met and talked to people working at Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Nubank, CircleCI, etc., and I can confidently say: your self-conviction is absolutely backwards.

Lisp-world has never been more cornucopian than today; we see the proliferation of different tools and new Lisp dialects popping almost every passing week - Jank, Jolt, ClojureDart, Squint, Coalton, Clojerl, LFE, uLisp, etc. It is frankly inconceivable to find today any platform where you can't really run a Lisp. My advice to any programmer who's aspired to become a hacker - do learn Lisp. It comes in handy. For real.

+1 upvote

I don’t agree with you but your comment is very well thought out and doesn’t deserve downvotes.

> Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language.

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