I'm curious why Lisp didn't gain mass popularity despite its advantages. In fact, I was wondering if it's popularity has event decreased in the past decade or so. I remember in the 2000s and even early 2010s, there were active discussion on Clojure, Scheme, and functional/logic programming in general. There seems much less discussion or usage nowadays. One theory is that popular languages have absorbed many features of functional programming, so the mainstream programmers do not feel the need to switch. My pet theory is that many of us mortals get the productivity boost from the ecosystem, in particular powerful libraries and frameworks. Given that, the amazing features of lisp, such as its s-expression, may not be powerful enough to sway users to switch.
Is it the right link? "Lisp" is mentioned once, in a good way. It's an old post too, it mentions Emacs' ilisp mode, which is the now unused ancestor of Slime.
> I'm curious why Lisp didn't gain mass popularity despite its advantages.
In my opinion Lisp is too flexible. I think the ideal use of Lisp is one or a few talented developers exploring the problem space and creating the MVP. Then a follow on team to reimplement it in a mainstream language that’s more maintainable by “mere mortals”.
Ime it’s similar to the fact that projects implemented with statically typed languages are easier to maintain than dynamically typed languages. Lisp is so flexible even lexical scoping (of variables for example) is a choice. Not what I’d care to have juniors or run of the mill seniors responsible for!
Lisp was the first to have first-class functions and garbage collection which have become common language features by now. But it also has many features that still are not widespread. Its metaprogramming is unparalleled, especially reader macros. A lot of its power comes from that. Rust macros and C++26 compile time reflection are steps in the right direction but still nowhere near what Lisp offers. Java's Project Babylon is also cool but not in the same ballpark.
When doing joint debugging with teammates, I've seen so many of them randomly add or remove & and * from C++ statements trying to get their code to compile, without bothering to reason through the issue. I suspect this stochastic approach to code development is pretty common. That is not going to unlock the benefits of metaprogramming either, where you have to deliberately build up the language you want to have.
Metaprogramming is extremely powerful but hard to use, especially for novices. I also think there is a general lack of education about programming languages and compilers at play here. So much of Lisps power comes from knowing that.
