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@gmail.com> wrote:


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


On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery@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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