Reid McKenzie

Speaking as a Lisper, I have to admit that this is an open question for me. On the one hand, the needs of parallel systems and state management offered by functional languages stands to bring Lisps (Clojure, Common Lisp etc) and other languages like Erlang ever more attention as we programmers attempt to manage the complexities of multicore design and distributed systems. As a systems programming language I think that lisp has utterly failed. The Lisp machines are dead for various reasons (which I'm researching right now as a side-project) and to the best of my knowledge compiled lisp has clearly not taken the place of C in building operating systems (although I hope to do exactly that as does the author of [http://www.loper-os.org/]). All of this comes down to an individual's definition of utility. Lisp is by definition of Turing Completeness just as capable as any other language you may wish to name, but with the usual Turing Tarpit or small language warning that you may have to roll your own. My perception, and one which several posts here on HN has affirmed is that traditionally Lisp was used by lone AI researchers who needed the power to roll their own anything quickly and efficiently. As a result of this "roll my own" mentality and simple lack of the internet (it was early and mid 1980s or so) libraries and SDKs as we know them were never built for Lisp systems. Another difficulty is that as several other comments note there is no "one true" standard for Lisp. There…

> but does not clearly communicate this up front Author of Clojure fork (cursive is mine) > Clojure is Rich's personal project, which he is so kind as to share with the rest of us and in in its refinement Rich chooses to accept some amount of input from us as users. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that it took me two years to realize this https://www.arrdem.com/2016/02/22/clojarr_-_a_friendly_clojure_fork/

Totally understood re: timbre and not being a part of the problem of the Java logging ecosystem. I'll play with it again next time I have a chance and see if the interop lib can't solve some of the issues I had before. Yeah, the post you folks put out on core.typed last fall (https://circleci.com/blog/why-were-no-longer-using-core-typed/) was certainly disappointing but not unexpected...I'm curious to see if Jaunt goes anywhere at this point too: https://www.arrdem.com/2016/02/22/clojarr_-_a_friendly_clojure_fork/ Anyways, thanks for the piece!