Harri Haataja wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 12:34:57PM +0100, Mark Carter wrote:
>
>>This is not a troll, honest, so please bear with me ...
>>
>>It struck me that Lisp was, perhaps, the Ultimate Programming
>>Language, the One True Language to rule them all; except that I always
>>kept  abandoning it for one reason or another (fiddly installation,
>>lack of libraries, compatability problems,  cost, possible license
>>issues, etc.). My current foray in Haskell seems encouraging.
>>wxHaskell installed a breeze, and seems quite usable (even though I'm
>>a raw n00b to the language, and admittedly haven't grokked the
>>semantics, and all this  <cid:part1.01000702.09000407@yahoo.co.uk> IO
>>a -> IO () business). On the one hand, it  seems kinda academic, but
>>on the other, it looks like it wants to be practical, too.
>
>
>>Bearing this in mind, and hoping you can see where I'm coming from, I
>>think my question is: shouldn't you guys be using Lisp?
>
>
>Given the words above, I wonder why the question is this way around :)
>
The thing that struck me as being really cool about Lisp is the whole macro and the "code is data" idea. In the book Practical Common Lisp they show how data could be expressed as lists, which you could then easily serialise and deserialise to/from a file. How cool is that?! Plus you can use macros to extend the language.

Alas, pulling against this seems to be a number of minuses. The commercial Lisp implementations may be good, but what wannabe hacker is going to fork out the cash for those babies? The free ones that work on Windows are GPL, which means that although somebody might be tempted to use them for personal projects, he is not going to sell the idea to his boss that stuff should be developed in Lisp. Plus there are the fragmentation issues. I managed to get wxCL (wxWidgets for Common Lisp) to install and run on CLISP. I figured that ODBC connectivity should be next on the list, and found that I needed defsystem to make it run. So then I have to track down defsystem, get that installed, etc. etc.. It reminds me of one of those adventure games from my ZX81 days. In order to catch the bird you need the cage and the seed, but oh dear, you're carrying the rod which scares the bird, and so on. It's horribly complicated. Well, the following page goes into far greater detail than I ever could:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWeHateLisp
I daren't post this message on comp.lang.lisp you understand, as that would just be inviting Electric Death, as Douglas Adamas might say.


                
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