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Comment by sds2 | Hacker News Reader

> It's unfortunate that ML and Lisp didn't gain greater traction but that's likely due to Unix.

Lisp and ML are competing by nature(MLs are famous from their typesystems) and their "failure" is not because of unix, but because of their inability to deliver 'fast' & readable apps. Also, the learning curve...

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The performance claim doesn't really matter in a world where we use languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and Javascript for major applications. Also, compared to these languages, Common Lisp seems to generally be faster (and, on most implementation/architecture combinations, supports real parallelism).

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...

> The performance claim doesn't really matter in a world where we use languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and Javascript for major applications.

Yes, it does. And those languages are all providing negative user/developer experience.

>Lisp and ML are competing by nature(MLs are famous from their typesystems) and their "failure" is not because of unix, but because of their inability to deliver 'fast' & readable apps.

Lisp under SBCL is as fast as Java under the latest Oracle JVM and for numeric computation is sometimes as fast as Fortran.

This means at least 10-20x faster than CPython, Ruby's MRI and others.

I routinely read third-party Lisp libraries and they are very readable, no problems with that.

> Lisp under SBCL is as fast as Java under the latest Oracle JVM and for numeric computation is sometimes as fast as Fortran.

Back it up.

> I routinely read third-party Lisp libraries and they are very readable, no problems with that.

Me too and they're all junk.

Wait, learning curve? Relative to C++ or Java?

You can write something that passes acceptance tests in C++ without a lot of effort. It's things like removing all the bugs, memory leaks, and undefined behaviors that requires enormous expertise. There is certainly a lot of ground to cover before C++ mastery can be had, but simple OOP and procedural programs aren't that bad.

> You can write something that passes acceptance tests in C++ without a lot of effort.

True for freshman-year

    std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl

programs maybe. People's heads asplode when they get into C++ with any sophistication because they need to grasp several things at once: classes, inheritance and polymorphism, pointers (smart or not), value vs. reference types, etc. Java, JavaScript, and even Lisp go a long way toward hiding those details from the programmer.

Java is perhaps cumbersome to use at times (and especially in older versions), but it's not a complicated language, in fact it is a lot simpler than most.

It's not, however, simpler than ML or Lisp. Just more familiar.

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