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0 pointsonion2k9y ago0 comments

Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it?

The reason is because "best" can have more than one meaning. Languages are usually only "best" at one thing, not for all things. In the case of many languages that people consider to be "best", they've been optimised for the development process (making it nice to write code in) rather than speed (C) or security (Ada) or a specific niche (R) or maintainability (not sure) or customisability (LISP). They're designed to make writing code more straightforward. Languages that are optimised to be easy to code with are the languages that tend to bubble up to the top when it comes to popularity contests because the more people who can access the language the more popular it's going to be.

There is an argument that Ruby is mostly LISP, so it could be said that lots of people use it very happily everyday.

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vishbar9y ago· 1 in thread

> There is an argument that Ruby is mostly LISP, so it could be said that lots of people use it very happily everyday.

How is that? I thought Lisp's "killer app" was its extremely powerful macroing system. Does Ruby have an equivalent?

onion2kOP9y ago

It has class level declarations which do the same thing.

jodrellblank9y ago

I would go with that, in the sense that "here's a box of parts" is the most customisable way to solve a problem - yet not the best way for most people.

Except, even people doing exploratory stuff apparently aren't using Common-LISP.

Let me point to Slava from RethinkDB, who wrote blogs about how amazing LISP is and then went to found a new-software startup written in C++. Peter Norvig, AI researcher, who moved from LISP to Python.

And even your mention of Ruby - "Common LISP is the best langauge", then why is Ruby even needed? Why aren't those people happily using Common LISP? Simply because it wasn't actually any better, and was in fact worse than Ruby in whatever metrics.

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