From: welch@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp vs English (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 26 Jan 1993 20:56:15 -0500
Organization: OSU-LAIR
	<19930122162651.0.SWM@SUMMER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
	<1993Jan23.073029.29713@linus.mitre.org>
	<1993Jan27.000253.28545@linus.mitre.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu
In-reply-to: john@thelonius.mitre.org's message of Wed, 27 Jan 1993 00:02:53 GMT

In article <1993Jan27.000253.28545@linus.mitre.org> john@thelonius.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes:

     ... but parsing english is legendary for its difficulty.

   You must make a distinction between syntactic correctness and understanding.  I'm
   not sure which you mean by "illegible", but if I can't parse your trivially
   written sentence, and few other English speakers can either, then it ain't
   English, by definition.

Back in the mists of time when I took a course on natural language
programming we were asked to parse "I saw the man on the hill with the
telescope". I seem to remember 7 different ways to parse it. It's
perfectly good, trivial english, you just need a whole lot of context to know
what's the right one.

This has gotten pretty far afield from the original discussion, but
none of these "reasons why Lisp isn't a mainstream language" seem
reasonable.

We can't change the syntax, it'll confuse more people than it'll
convert. I remember trying to teach people about the alternate syntax
provided by Interlisp, which provides the usual syntax, apply-form,
and infix form. It's too damn confusing, and it's just easier if you
learn the regular syntax. I know a lot of people who find the Lisp
syntax a lot easier to deal with than C's, for example.

Lisp images are large because there's a fair amount of other support
(Yes, I realise that MCL is only 2.5 Mb. However, how does that
compare with other programs on Mac's?) in the image, and yes, the
language definition is huge. There have been recent developments on
this score, like tree shakers and shared libraries. Besides, if
smallness of the language was an indicator why isn't everyone
programming in Scheme? SIOD will fit in 64K, if memory serves. 

I think there are other reasons for Lisps non-popularity, some of them
historical. Lisp got tied in to the AI binge, and when AI busted it
took Lisp with it. There've been a lot of other myths about Lisp
raised through time too, most of which have stuck (Lisp isn't good for
number-crunching, Lisp is slow, etc.) no matter how untrue they were.
Some blame can also be put on the Lisp programmer community itself,
through pricing itself out of the market during the AI heyday. One of
Lisp's greatest features is it's extensibility, but this has also
resulted in the mudball theory of programming language design :-). 

I think an associated question we should be asking is "How can we
increase Lisp's popularity"? Knowing why it isn't popular is a good
thing to discuss, but it would also be good to know where to go from
here. Another question is "Should Lisp be a mainstream language?" I'm
not sure the answer to that is yes. A lot of neat ideas have risen out
of Lisp not having been standardised to death early on. CLOS is a case
in point. If we'd standardised on Interlisp and LOOPS or Zetalisp and
Flavors I think we'd be a lot poorer today. 

I'll stop now, I think this is certainly turning out to be an
interesting discussion.

...arun
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab for AI Research, Ohio State University
welch@cis.ohio-state.edu

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme