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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

> So, how come Ruby is more marketshare than, say, SML?

How much of that still applies if you take away Rails (and all the marketshare that came from it, and all the resulting tools, etc.)? Having a killer application makes a big difference.

The killer application of SML seems to be teaching, and awesome compiler research. With all due respect to SMLers, that's much less likely to interest hordes of average web developers.

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Separating a language from the things you build in it kinda misses the point of the language. Ruby inspired / allowed Rails. Sadly, Lisp and SML haven't have powered anything of similar popularity.

And I think this is what the author was saying. In Lispland you don't get something like Rails, you get a bunch of 80% solutions, all different.

Separating a language from the things you build in it kinda misses the point of the language.

What if the things you build in it are all largely similar, mostly small variations on a common theme?

It's the difference between "Foo is a great language", and, "Foo is a great language for building applications that do Bar."

"How much of that still applies if you take away Rails"

Why no rails in lisp? I think the essay gives a good answer to that question.

I have no idea what Rails actually does, but I recently wrote a web application for a school project in Common Lisp, using just libraries (Hunchentoot, LML2 and Postmodern mostly) that aren't really meant to work together in any significant way, and I can't imagine the programming of the application would've been made any easier by using any sort of "framework". And I only wrote one macro if I remember correctly. So perhaps in some sense Lisp doesn't need "rails", good libraries are enough. Anecdotal, I know.

this explains it all ;)

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