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0 pointsAnimalMuppet9y ago0 comments

Very good list of some issues that lead to "the new hotness" all the time. I had not thought of some of these; it's not totally brain-dead fanboyism.

One issue that (good) bosses have is that they cannot allow their business to be held hostage by one person. If that person quits (or dies), they have to be able to replace them. Esolangs are a hard sell on that basis alone, no matter how fit for use they may be.

I'd forgotten Clojure (and others!) - yes, Lisp is more popular than "things named Lisp". And, arguably, Clojure is popular enough these days that the argument in the previous paragraph doesn't really apply to it any longer. (Whether bosses know that is a separate issue.)

Then there's the claim by Guy Steele that, in creating Java, he dragged a bunch of C++ programmers "halfway to Common Lisp". (Lisp purists might concede some fraction considerably less than half...) Paul Graham says that the Lisp feature set is slowly taking over programming languages. Lisp may die but still conquer, or mostly conquer.

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lispm9y ago

What Java mostly got from Lisp was parts of memory model and the managed memory, not so much on the language side. Smalltalk got that from Lisp too. Ruby also (the Ruby developer studied the Emacs Lisp implementation). Microsoft's CLR also. Actually parts of the early Microsoft .net CLR GC were written in Lisp and automatically translated to C.

But Java could not do a lot of things a typical Lisp implementation can do, sometimes with a good reason for that.

  * runtime compilation
  * loading of code (-> custom class loader)
  * garbage collection of code is sometimes difficult
  * saving/starting of memory dumps
  * fast startup times
  * tail call optimization
  * updating changed objects
  * calling error system -> Java has a terminating error system

For most of these problems some 'solutions' have been developed. On the language level the Java community experimented with some original Lisp stuff, too. But not much was added to the language, but at least they got lambda expressions (1958 in Lisp) and a first kind of multiple inheritance of code (around 1980 in Lisp via Flavors). Java soon will have a standard shell for incremental use ( https://blogs.oracle.com/java/jshell-and-repl-in-java-9 ) - that was around 1960 in Lisp. Now imagine when Macros will be added...

But generally knowing Lisp does not help you much with Java, since the language's OOP model is very different from the typical OOP in Lisp (see CLOS+MOP).

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