Juan Reynoso Elias
En 2019-02-15 13:37:47
Where did we go wrong?
Why didn't Common Lisp fix the world?



Peter Norvig, Started Lisp in 1974; Symbolics/TI Lisp machines; wrote a book and toy compilers
 
I think the ideas in Common Lisp did fix the world. If you go back to 1981, Lisp was considered unusual because it had features like the following that were not known to C programmers:

  •     Garbage collection.
  •     A rich set of collection types and operations on them.
  •     A powerful object system with multiple inheritance and generic functions.
  •     A powerful exception handling mechanism.
  •     A sublanguage for defining test cases (ok, not an official part of the language, but I certainly had one set up).
  •     An interactive read-eval-print loop.
  •     An agile, incremental development style rather than an all-at-once style.
  •     Introspection into run-time objects and functions.
  •     A macro system that lets you define domain specific languages.

Today, all those features, except for macros, are common in the popular languages. So the ideas won, but the Common Lisp implementations didn't -- perhaps because CL had a lot of legacy cruft from a language that goes back to 1958; perhaps because some people just don't like parentheses.

As for macros, I wish they had caught on too, but when you use them you are becoming a language designer, and some development teams, especially larger ones, prefer the stability of not having the language change underneath them. I think it would be better to handle macros with a style guide that defines best practices for their use, rather than removing the
m altogether (or having severely limited macros as in C). reference

 #lisp
 

Reference:
https://www.quora.com/Where-did-we-go-wrong-Why-didnt-Common-Lisp-fix-the-world