[Seattle] Fwd: Seattle CL People?

[Clint Moore]

  That's very well put.  I suspect I'll be mulling "There's no early career
credit for that sort of thing, no way to stand out from the crowd." for
quite some time.

> "Technical merit" doesn't get very far in the social world.

  And no amount of me standing with my fist in the air (other hand possibly
steadying myself with a cane) and yelling "But it should, damnit!" is going
to change that.



On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
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