On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:22:22 +0000
Martin Coxall <pseudo.m...@me.com> wrote:
> On 19 Dec 2009, at 13:50, Stefan Kamphausen wrote:
> > * Reason. They could have been taken away in more than 50 years of
> > history. Guess what, they are still there.
> Guess what? NOBODY uses Lisp. Because of those parens.
You've overstated the case. Both times.
I encounter about one company a year that uses LISP commercially -
mostly doing the heavy lifting on the back end server in what we call
"cloud" applications these days. Anyone serious about either emacs or
Autocad works with lisp. XlispStat seems to still be alive and
well. Sure, even all put together, they're a really small fringe group
- but the difference between "nothing" and "almost nothing" can be
*very* significant (just ask the guy who though that the Tacoma
narrows wind resonance was nothing).
Second, I've encountered both people and companies that have dropped
LISP, and the reason is almost never "those parens." It usually
because of one of a number of reasons that can be summarized as "LISP
doesn't play well with others":
1. Lack of access to system libraries and frameworks.
2. The pain of sharing data with system utilities and applications.
3. The difficulty of moving programs to other platforms, *especially* if
the LISP has solved 1 & 2!
This is why the people doing LISP commercially tend to use it on
servers - they duck issue #3 for getting the solution to their
customers, and thus only have to find an implementation that solves #1
and 2 on their server platform.
Note that Clojure solves all three problems by running on the JVM with
Java integration.
Of course, the question is - how much have you overstated the case?
Because that will determine how true this is:
On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:16:03 -0500
ajay gopalakrishnan <ajgop...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why is it that you believe them to be mutually exclusive events? You portray
> Software engineers as if they are Gods and the most brilliant minds on the
> planet. A lot are just average. And ofcourse, if Clojure does not try to
> make them feel at home, it is just going to be another Hobby language.
> That's all.
Possibly. But what do you mean by "Hobby language"? Something like Oz,
which only a few people have heard of, and is pretty much only used
academically? I suspect we're already past that stage. Or something
like Python, which has a fair share of the LAMP market, in spite of
having syntax issues that drive about as much discussion as the parens
in LISP do, but almost no presence as an "enterprise language"?
If the latter, I'm perfectly happy with that. I've made pretty good
living writing Python the past decade or so. If I were willing to use
Django or one of the other web templating systems built in Python, I
could have done even better.
The question here is, how much are you willing to give up in order to
make Clojure "an enterprise language"? In the python community - and
I've already seen a bit of it here - complaints about the lack of
static type checking are about as common as complaints about the lack
block delimiters. Are we going to add type declarations to Clojure to
make those people "feel at home"? The end result of this path is that
Clojure just becomes another Java, and won't be as productive or as
much fun as it is today.
One of the best things about Python is that the community wants the
language to actually improve, even if it means not growing the
community. Features aren't normally added to the language just because
a lot of people want them; they're added because they actually answer
a real need, and don't encourage people to write ugly code.
Part of this is because they realize that adding a feature has a cost
even for people who don't use it. If nobody uses it, why add it? If
somebody uses it, then at some point you'll encounter code that does -
so you'll have to know about it. If it encourages the creation of ugly
code, so much the worse. The net result of these attitudes is that,
even after nearly 20 years of change and community growth, python
remains both powerful and a joy to write and read.
So, does it really do you any good to add features to Clojure that
attract more programmers if the end result is a language that you
don't enjoy programming in, and that doesn't give you the productivity
that drew you to the language in the first place?
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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