| 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546 |
- May 2003If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was
- asked this question by a student in the audience at a
- talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either.In languages, as in so many things, there's not much
- correlation between popularity and quality. Why does
- John Grisham (King of Torts sales rank, 44) outsell
- Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice sales rank, 6191)?
- Would even Grisham claim that it's because he's a better
- writer?Here's the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice:
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
- in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a
- wife.
- "It is a truth universally acknowledged?" Long words for
- the first sentence of a love story.Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. Its syntax, or lack
- of syntax, makes it look completely unlike
- the languages
- most people are used to. Before I learned Lisp, I was afraid
- of it too. I recently came across a notebook from 1983
- in which I'd written:
- I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
- Fortunately, I was 19 at the time and not too resistant to learning
- new things. I was so ignorant that learning
- almost anything meant learning new things.People frightened by Lisp make up other reasons for not
- using it. The standard
- excuse, back when C was the default language, was that Lisp
- was too slow. Now that Lisp dialects are among
- the faster
- languages available, that excuse has gone away.
- Now the standard excuse is openly circular: that other languages
- are more popular.(Beware of such reasoning. It gets you Windows.)Popularity is always self-perpetuating, but it's especially
- so in programming languages. More libraries
- get written for popular languages, which makes them still
- more popular. Programs often have to work with existing programs,
- and this is easier if they're written in the same language,
- so languages spread from program to program like a virus.
- And managers prefer popular languages, because they give them
- more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced.Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent,
- there would be little justification for using any but the most
- popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long
- shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's
- novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading
- the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people
- reading Jane Austen instead.
|
