Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp

[Paolo Amoroso]

I've just stumbled upon this 2021 post by The Register Linux and FOSS editor Liam Proven: Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp. He argues that what holds back Lisp is a toolchain whose arcane terminology and unfamiliar user interfaces predated the standardization of the PC era. Liam also suggests that Medley, due to its open source nature, could be a starting point for modernizing Lisp.

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Paolo Amoroso | Blog | Mastodon

[pixel...@gmail.com]

To me, the article is mostly him being his own worst enemy over Emacs.

Unfamiliar terminology happens frequently in learning.

It seems for most of his time he's trying all he can to avoid learning the tools  (weird dead Emacs distributions) and then complaining he can't reach escape velocity. The fact that he's frustrated when people give him the commands to do what he wants hints at that.

If he wants a more graphical GUI environment for ANSI Common Lisp, he can try Lem or CLOG. There are some other options which are newer.

Culturally, the average Common Lisp user tends to embrace the rigor of learning something "odd" to begin with and learning the tools of the trade is simply part of that rigor. I would say for that reason, Lisp programmers are masters of their craft. MANY have read the entire language spec while many professionals today have never even picked up a book on their language as everything is simple language glue struggle programmed against poorly documented web frameworks.

Things can be done to ease learning for the newcomer - I'm not against that! There comes a point though where the newcomer simply wants you to drag everything back to what they're familiar with through no effort of their own. Those are the kind of fickle programmers that are jumping languages and tools every month to begin with. And that's often why they can't commit to long term learning. It impedes the hype/bust cycle.

[Arun Welch]

1) You can absolutely drive SBCL with Visual Studio Code right now. The fact that the tooling is more mature in Emacs is because more people have dedicated the effort to make it so. Which leads to:
2) I don’t think there’s anything in either the Medley or the SBCL license that would preclude someone from building a new UI on top. There was at least one attempt with Jarl’s Motif work on the Medley side, and there’s a plethora of stuff on the SBCL side. He’s welcome to go for it.

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[Paolo Amoroso]

There have long been other environments with standard interfaces similar to what Proven suggests: Allegro CL and LispWorks.