Comment by jfm3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfm3 | Hacker News Reader

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"I'll be the first to admit that it comes off as trollish. It's just I see these pronouncements about a language that make claims, which frankly I don't think can be backed up. I like Lisp as a language. I really do. But to me that's not sufficient to annoint it a super language."

The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience. I will paraphrase three arguments: the parent post blog link was saying "look, I'm not an amazing programmer, but in my experience, armed with Common Lisp, I can approximate what I see ur-programmers do with other languages at Google." He in turn was replying to a person saying "I don't think Lisp makes you more productive." The "Lisp is not really a super language, it has nothing to show for itself, and I could make similar claims about logo." thing got interjected by you, I think.

"Moreover, in no field of creative human endeavor have popularity and worthiness been correlated. You think all those billboard top 10 acts came from Juliard?"

"Are you arguing that for music that college serves little purpose? That we're entering some type of music education bubble. :-)"

No, I think that's what you're arguing. I'm saying Lisp is worthy, and should not be judged by its popularity, because the worthiness is what reallly matters. You're arguing it has "nothing to show for itself". I'm sure with a Sun Java marketing budget and the right people we could make Lisp as popular as we wanted. We could have whitepapers and case studies to "show" as much as you like. I'm only concerned with popularity when people dismiss my arguments about worthiness the minute they assess the popularity. I have the same problem when I try to tell them about Sun Ra or the Residents.

So all that being said, to address your actual point (however disjoint from the OP it might be), nobody's claiming it's a "super language", just often better for the people who commit to using it despite it's unpopularity. I can back up my claims of betterness with arguments about worthiness, but not about popularity, but then I don't think the later kind of argument matters in the first place.

The post we are commenting on was by a person who was not making a claim, but relaying an experience.

He was not only relaying an experience, as he cites the Lisp Curse. See:

"I do believe in the Lisp curse that the power of the language is in some respects self-undermining because it empowers the individual and so tends to attract people who don't work well in teams."

And I'm sure you've read the Lisp Curse.

His essay argues that he's really not a great programmer, but Lisp gets him to principal engineer! He further implies that Lisp really is something beyond other languages with his statement about the planner code (of code, he never considers that porting often fails even within the same language family for a variety of reasons).

I'm sure with a Sun Java marketing budget and the right pepole we could make Lisp as popular as we wanted.

How do you explain C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, and PHP? None had very extensive marketing budgets.

So all that being said, to address your actual point (however disjoint from the OP it might be), nobody's claiming it's a "super language", just often better for the people who commit to using it despite it's unpopularity. I can back up my claims of betterness with arguments about worthiness, but not about popularity, but then I don't think the later kind of argument matters in the first place.

I don't know what your metric of worthiness is. Maybe its the existence of some esoteric feature. You say I talk about popularity, but I only do so to ask for an example of the "worthiness" you speak of. As I said before the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. If you tell me you have some great pudding, but it tastes like cow dung, I won't be impressed regardless of how many fine ingredients you use and advanced cooking methods employed. It still tastes like cow dung. And I'm not saying that Lisp is cow dung, but I am saying that fancy ingredients and world class ovens don't impress me if you're making the same McDonald's sandwich as everyone else.

And when you start creating great pudding, you won't need the marketing budget.

Java is the best example of a not-so-great pudding being pulled along for over a decade (till it became better) just because of a large budget.

"How do you explain C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, and PHP? None had very extensive marketing budgets."

I think a lot of these have larger marketing budgets than you imagine. I can't fathom the amount of money Microsoft spends promoting its C++ language tools, for example.

Regardless of whether languages other than Java become popular or not because of marketing, I still maintain that popularity and worthiness are not correlated. The majority of people may not eat cow dung, but they certainly don't eat really great pudding. They eat the same so-so pudding everyone else does, and most of them don't realize or don't care that it could be better. You will have nothing to "show" for coming up with a better pudding recipe unless you spend money on advertising, manufacturing, distribution, etc..

As for an example of worthiness, Lisp's advantages have been detailed one metric kerjillion times elsewhere. Macros, conditions, and the MOP are the usual suspects in the case of Common Lisp.

I think his point was not "why is Lisp not popular", but if it is so powerful, why has it not become more mainstream based upon that? If a language is truly as powerful as its advocates assert, should it need a marketing budget? Ruby, via Ruby on Rails, is famous, and has been used on lots of highly visible (successful?) projects, with no traditional marketing budget.

I think he's asking, if Lisp is so awesome, why doesn't someone ever do something awesome with it? It seems like a fair question.

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