[Seattle] Fwd: Seattle CL People?

[Brandon Van Every]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 1:10 PM, Clint Moore <clint at ivy.io> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> As of a few years ago, my assessment of the Common Lisp universe was that
>> anyone who once had the energy for standards, promotion, adoption, etc. is
>> now too old, and past their generational energy, to bother with such
>> things.  New generations learn their own things, and although they may use
>> many design ideas of lisp, they're just not going to use Common Lisp for
>> the most part.  For instance, Julia claims some lisp ancestry.
>> http://julialang.org/
>>
>>
>   It strikes me as rather sad that, while it's stylish to declare that a
> language borrows ideas from CL, it's not stylish at all to actually use it.
>
>
I think a reality of software that some techies have a hard time
acknowledging, is that they're social processes.  "Technical merit" doesn't
get very far in the social world.  We all know that languages with deep
pocketed corporations behind them see widespread adoption, unless the
language *truly* sucks.  An average and uninspired language with a
corporate backer will be promulgated far and wide.  Many other patterns of
adoption are social; "worse is better" has a social analysis.  But I do
think the dearth of Common Lisp is fundamentally generational.  New
programmers want to make their mark, and they aren't intellectually
invested in what came before, at least not a priori.  Stakeholders in
Common Lisp have aged out.

There's also enough cumbersome and unwieldy about Common Lisp to envision
something "better", if one is being honest.  But what is "better" ?  Go the
Scheme route, and eventually you discover that it's not enough to do big
picture industrial everything and the kitchen sink kind of development.  So
then the Scheme communities try to "modernize" and it starts to look like
they're walking towards Common Lisp.  Maybe where they end up isn't as
bloated.  Or maybe they don't end up in a similar place at all, even though
it looks superficially like they might, because they're a distinct
community in time with specific problems they're interested in.

How much "betterness" does one throw at something?  Most language designers
don't seem to be fans of incrementalism, just gradually improving something
that already exists.  There's no early career credit for that sort of
thing, no way to stand out from the crowd.

Also there's the problem of controlling one's destiny in the face of other
stakeholders.  For instance, if you're "merely" improving the build system
for a language primarily authored by someone else, and that author decides
he doesn't like the build system after all, guess who's shown the door?
Social process again.  The merit of various components is not likely to be
objective, it's probably all down to subjective criteria and design
tradeoffs.  Tradeoffs create developer drama and heads roll.  Or, only the
most patient people can stand to put up with committee / standardization
dynamics, and to what ultimate end?


Cheers,
Brandon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/seattle/attachments/20150213/99d5713e/attachment.html>