Lisp is, without question, THE best language for personal productivity. It is intensely optimised for the single speaker of a language, the single programmer of an entire system - indeed, for creators of worlds. It is a language unique in its ability to allow a single programmer to vanish up their own rear end (in the best of ways) whilst still outperforming a hundred-strong team.
Strip it of that, and you lose the point of Lisp. There are lots of languages that encourage that old oxymoron, "team productivity" (teams, by their very nature, can never run at maximum individual efficiency - they need the bureaucracy precisely BECAUSE they're made up of individuals... team programming vs individual programming is somewhat akin to the scientific method vs direct divine revelation). They exist to ease the pain of bureaucracy at the expense of individual expressiveness - precisely the opposite of Lisp. They suck where Lisp excels, but they also excel where Lisp sucks.
If collectivism is truly the way of the future, if there is no longer any place for the lone wolf programmer in this world, then don't try to drag Lisp into a place it never wanted to be; just let it die, and resign yourself to a future made of Java, PHBs and fail.
It will always be with the individual, the awkward, the obstreperous, the disagreeable that Lisp will thrive. Let it do so. Leave the herds to their grassy commons; accept that the sacrifice of climbing mountains, aside from the risk of occasionally falling off, is that you climb alone. And derive pride, not shame, from writing exquisite poetry in a language nobody else understands - for isn't that why we become dissatisfied with existing languages in the first place?
If you don't want to collaborate on writing software with other people, XCVB will hardly force you to do it. Stay in your hole, nobody cares. Someday, you may understand the concept of "division of labor". In the meantime, why don't you build computers out of parts you made yourself out of raw materials you extracted or grew yourself?
As for the rest of us, we understand that individuals benefit from collaborating with each other, and that good collaboration tools (as opposed to bureaucracy) are enablers that allow each one to do what he could never have dreamt to do all by himself.
Note that in the Lisp family, the PLT Scheme community has no problem providing a separate compilation module system that offers all that XCVB promises and much more (except that they don't handle distribution and caching at this point). People casually develop new languages and dialects that integrate in the PLT virtual machine, and can mix and match between modules created in many such languages.
"that old oxymoron, "team productivity" (teams, by their very nature, can never run at maximum individual efficiency - they need the bureaucracy precisely BECAUSE they're made up of individuals"
It's no oxymoron. Teams have productivity. Just because each piece of a system isn't running at perfect efficiency doesn't mean it's meaningless to measure the whole.
"If collectivism is truly the way of the future, if there is no longer any place for the lone wolf programmer in this world"
Using Lisp doesn't preclude using libraries. In fact, they're far more powerful than libraries in other languages, since Lisp libraries can add syntax (like ITERATE).
If you don't want ad-hoc collaboration with other Lisp programmers, why stop with libraries? Drop all of Common Lisp, too -- no need for standard functions like REMOVE-IF-NOT, when each "lone wolf" can just implement it herself. We'll give everybody McCarthy's Lisp 1 just to spite Java PHBs!
Lisp is, without question, THE best language for personal productivity. It is intensely optimised for the single speaker of a language, the single programmer of an entire system - indeed, for creators of worlds. It is a language unique in its ability to allow a single programmer to vanish up their own rear end (in the best of ways) whilst still outperforming a hundred-strong team.
Strip it of that, and you lose the point of Lisp. There are lots of languages that encourage that old oxymoron, "team productivity" (teams, by their very nature, can never run at maximum individual efficiency - they need the bureaucracy precisely BECAUSE they're made up of individuals... team programming vs individual programming is somewhat akin to the scientific method vs direct divine revelation). They exist to ease the pain of bureaucracy at the expense of individual expressiveness - precisely the opposite of Lisp. They suck where Lisp excels, but they also excel where Lisp sucks.
If collectivism is truly the way of the future, if there is no longer any place for the lone wolf programmer in this world, then don't try to drag Lisp into a place it never wanted to be; just let it die, and resign yourself to a future made of Java, PHBs and fail.
It will always be with the individual, the awkward, the obstreperous, the disagreeable that Lisp will thrive. Let it do so. Leave the herds to their grassy commons; accept that the sacrifice of climbing mountains, aside from the risk of occasionally falling off, is that you climb alone. And derive pride, not shame, from writing exquisite poetry in a language nobody else understands - for isn't that why we become dissatisfied with existing languages in the first place?
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As for the rest of us, we understand that individuals benefit from collaborating with each other, and that good collaboration tools (as opposed to bureaucracy) are enablers that allow each one to do what he could never have dreamt to do all by himself.
Note that in the Lisp family, the PLT Scheme community has no problem providing a separate compilation module system that offers all that XCVB promises and much more (except that they don't handle distribution and caching at this point). People casually develop new languages and dialects that integrate in the PLT virtual machine, and can mix and match between modules created in many such languages.
Reply
It's no oxymoron. Teams have productivity. Just because each piece of a system isn't running at perfect efficiency doesn't mean it's meaningless to measure the whole.
"If collectivism is truly the way of the future, if there is no longer any place for the lone wolf programmer in this world"
Using Lisp doesn't preclude using libraries. In fact, they're far more powerful than libraries in other languages, since Lisp libraries can add syntax (like ITERATE).
If you don't want ad-hoc collaboration with other Lisp programmers, why stop with libraries? Drop all of Common Lisp, too -- no need for standard functions like REMOVE-IF-NOT, when each "lone wolf" can just implement it herself. We'll give everybody McCarthy's Lisp 1 just to spite Java PHBs!
Reply
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