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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> What we need are examples of Lisp-style languages leading to big wins.

How about JPL, used to control Mars probes and landers using ANSI lisp?

The most successful and influential CS course to date?

This website?

Lisp successes are out there. But it is harder to learn and understand than imperative languages, so it will never win out over Java and C# and Go and their ilk.

Due to the demand for developers outstripping the supply, we need languages that are safe for developers with wildly varying levels of skill to use - that limit the blast radius of their efforts in the worst case. One of the early design goals of Golang was exactly this - to make it simple for developers of varying skill to work together on code.

This isn't a knock on mediocre developers individually, but it is an unfortunate side effect of our need for so many of them.

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The JPL Lisp story is a fun story, and cool application of Lisp over 20 years ago. But it is by no means a Lisp success story. There is a reason no space probe since then has been controlled using Lisp (as far as I know).

Your links didn't come through, so I don't know what web site you are referring to. Maybe Orbitz? That was one success and still continues to be developed in CL by Google AFAIK. One outlier data point perhaps.

As for the 6.001 course at MIT, I took that course back in the day, and was saddened to hear it now is taught in Python.

You are correct that we need languages which have a ready supply of developers. In a commercial setting that fact alone will trump any language features or technology advantage. Java was meant to be the new Cobol and works hard at limiting programmer flexibility so they don't shoot themselves in the foot.

"This website" referred to Hacker News itself, which is written in a Lisp (Arc).

I don't think there's anything remarkable about this website that could be considered a "big win" for Lisp. It's a totally run-of-the-mill dynamic web app that could have been developed more quickly in any web framework such as Rails or Django.

In fact, the hacky way it was implemented in Lisp had some clear downsides. In the early days (I'm probably going to mess up the details but hopefully the gist will come through) there was a notorious failure mode due to the way entities such as stories and comments were stored in memory using closures. These closures obviously had to be cleaned out periodically, and so if you stayed on a page too long and then clicked a link on the page, it would be invalid. You'd have to go back and refresh the page and click the link again. I don't think it's out of bounds to say this website is basically a rehash of the hacks pg came up with in the mid 90s to implement web apps in Lisp for Viaweb. The fact that he got rich off those hacks may have been a selling point for Lisp 20 years ago when he wrote Beating the Averages, but the world has moved on.

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