Thursday, April 28, 2005

Lisp people! Give it up already!

We already took all your good ideas. Now get back in the closet! I admit a slight fascination with the language though, perhaps more so because the people who use it tend to love it but have problems relating why to outsiders. What is so good about it?!? This all comes up because of an article posted on slashdot today about a new book called Practical Common Lisp. This book, like everybody that you run into under the Lisp flag, wants so badly to convey that Lisp isn't "dead" and that it can be used for "real world" applications, not just academia. It's structure is fascinating, it's simplicity a thing of beauty, and it's certainly a primary source for many modern language features but please show me TWO mainstream applications (be it on the web, standalone, or otherwise) that are built in Lisp alone? I say two because if you're a Lisper, the first thing out of your mouth is going to be "the Yahoo stores". What common user app is written user app is written *in* Lisp? And Emacs is NOT a common user app. Microsoft Word is. I'm not trying to say that all languages must be mainstream app builders but maybe Lisps place really is in academic and scientific circles. So why try and convince us otherwise?

My first experience with it in college was smothered in "...but you can use it to make real world apps too!", then we'd iterate over a couple of lists to match up cities with their latitudes and longitudes or something of a similar nature.
The syntax was obtuse and the organization seemed to run orthogonal to all the object-oriented techniques that were shoved in our heads. The promise of the "real world" app never came to fruition. In fact, we only skimmed the surface of file I/O. Kind of important for real world apps! But I'm gonna keep reading. Want to see how that LISP mp3 database/browser app works out. At least this book is up to date and the author isn't totally off the deep end. Hopefully it will change my mind.

1 Comments:

Blogger PookieBadMuffin said...

Wouldn't the first thing out of their mouth *really* be: "Yahoo! Thtorths?"

12:43 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home