Is there a clear reason for this? I've only ever heard good things about lisp.
My impression, as a hobbyist programmer, is that lisp appeals to people who have a deep intellectual curiosity about the way programs work. It doesn't seem to appeal to the larger pool of programmers who are looking for a language thy can pick up in a straightforward way so thy can either get a job, or build a project they've been thinking of.
How many times have you written a dozen lines of for-loop that could've been one map/reduce? How many times have you written a whole page of Object { this.foo = ... } just to add the simplest of new features?
Literally the reason I got out of programming after high school almost 15 years ago and wrote it off as 'not for me' was that kind of tedium, and learning Lisp and FP were the point in my return when I said 'Oh, wait, actually this is pretty great; where the hell was this when I was a kid?'
Lisp didn't take off because 1) home-computer-ready implementations were largely out of reach for three decades, and 2) Lisp and FP both were embracing the importance of expressive power during an era in which most programming still worshiped doing things the hardest way possible. Shit, when I was a kid, you weren't a 'real programmer' unless you did everything in assembly. Then it was C above all, to be followed by EnterpriseFactoryJavaFactoryFactories.
By the standards of most of the programming world, where there are still real bosses who grade coder performance in KLOC, Lisp is 'wrong'. But pumping out thousands of lines of repetitive boilerplate is not equal to efficiency, it just looks like it to a work culture that only understands output of work rather than quality of work. If programmer A takes 1 hour to solve the problem with 100 LOC, and programmer B thinks for 45 minutes and then solves the same problem with 4, who's the most efficient in that scenario?
And more to the point, which of those two work environments do you want to sign on for?
Then thanks to my curiosity I delved into the Xerox's and Genera documentation.
It is sad that a PDP-11 and VMS descendedant won the mainstream.
How much better could computing be if those behind those systems hadn't failed to bring them to the masses.
However environments like the JVM, .NET and their tooling bring us somehow close to it.
Also Swift with its Playground is helping new generations to rediscover this experience.
So maybe not all is lost.
Rust, on the other hand, gives me palpitations.
Reasoning about Clojure (LISP) code is always easy because if you follow best practices you have small functions with very little context to understand.
On the top of these, I see the ratio of LOC 50:1 (worst case even higher) for Java : Clojure code that does the same thing. Usually people get triggered and say why does it matter, but in reality less code is better for everybody. Easier to understand, less chance of errors, etc. Correctness was long time lost for majority of Java developers, just put out a survey and you can see it for yourself.
It is also pretty common practice not to handle exceptions well and just let a DNS not found error explode as an IOexception and good luck tracking down what caused it (literary happened to me).
I understand that the average Java dev does not see any value in LISP (Clojure) but it silly to expect that the average of any group is going to lead the scientific advancement of any field including computer science.
One tendency that you can see if you are walking around with open eyes that the people who spent significant time in developing procedural code in an imperative language understand the importance of functional language features and the power of LISP. One can pretend it does not matter see you in 5-10 years and see how much this changes.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/577877590070919168
Lisp is minimal and abstract. That's appealing to a different set of people, who aren't satisfied with off-the-shelf abstraction levels. It's also fun and challenging to work at that level, though IMO it's not always going to translate to better productivity.
For me, learning assembly and going through the 80386 reference manuals were more rewarding in terms of understanding how programs work. Sorry I have no specific insight to offer on the question you asked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
When AI couldn't live up to the hype, funding dried up. A lot of that funding was driving the companies and research projects that were doing major Lisp development. After the AI Winter, Lisp was strongly associated with the unmet promises of AI and thus gained a reputation as a poor choice for serious projects.
It's never really recovered.
The hype moved to Clojure, Racket, Julia and other Lisp-like languages. The core Lisp may not have the same depth of commercial activity as in the 80s, but generally the implementations are in the best shape since two decades. There are still lots of open issues, but from the Lisp programmer standpoint, it's an incredible time.
“Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.”
being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers.
it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors.
anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic.
eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp asshole stage.
this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp.
it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts.
lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...
Maybe that's why I like Lisp so much. Because "social factors" are so frikkin' annoying and irrelevant and I feel the world would be so much better for everyone if we stopped paying so much attention to them as we do now.
As an example, the shells on my personal machines are often customized beyond the comprehension of anyone who isn't me, with tons of two-letter aliases and bash functions, cryptic environment variables, and a $PATH that's several terminal lines long, filled with labrythine symlinks and oneliners that I've accumulated over the years. Many people have similarly elaborate and impenetrable emacs configurations.
That's fine, since this is my personal environment, but at work (I'm a sysadmin, more or less) I'm still able to use more-or-less bash, and even write portable shell scripts that eschew bash-isms. Similarly, all that horrible e-lisp powering super-personalized workflows doesn't prevent someone from writing an emacs mode that they can share with others, the point being that a language that enables customization is great, because you can always just not do that and write code that others will find comprehensible.
Conversely, if your language forces you to write in a collaborative style, you can't gain efficiencies in your private use of it.
That's a... way of putting it I've never seen before. I'll remember the concept of "intimate" vs. "collaborative" language for the future.
Personally, even though I write a lot of Lisp and live inside Emacs, my environment seems to be quite... standard. The "collaborative" mindset is emphasized in pretty much every programming book out there, and I must have acquired this kind of weird fear of overcustomizing my environment thanks to it.
> Is there a clear reason for this?
Yes. In the 1980s AI was teh new shiny and at that time, Lisp was almost synonymous with AI.
A bunch of people over-promised when it came to AI and expert systems, and failed to deliver. And people conflated the failure of the promise of AI with the failure of Lisp. Essentially, guilt by association -- people can be dumb that way.
Amusingly, once something in the realm of AI actually works -- we stop calling it AI. But one thing is for certain: the scruffies have been right more often than the neats.
Still, Common Lisp is pretty effin' awesome.