Super-dee-duper D features

[Bill Baxter]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> kris wrote:
>>
>>>>> 5) Lisp gets things right, according to what I've read from heavy 
>>>>> Lisp users, by being a language that can be modified on the fly to 
>>>>> suit the task at hand, in other words, by having a customizable 
>>>>> language one can achieve dramatic productivity gains.
>>>>
>>>> Yet, Lisp will always remain a niche language. You have to wonder why.
>>>
>>> I'm pretty sure it's the syntax.
>>
>> And the recursion.
>> People just don't naturally think recursively.
>>
>> And the lack of mutable data structures.
>> OCaml tried to fix that, but OCaml's probably always going to be niche 
>> as well (see first point).
> 
> LISP does have mutation. 

Ok. My bad.

> Besides, many people naturally think 
> recursively, 

The statement was about why LISP is never going to be wildly popular. 
There may very well be "many" people who naturally think recursively, 
but if they're not a majority then that's a hurdle to LISP becoming popular.

> and many problems (e.g. parsing) can be easiest thought of 
> that way.

Sure.  However, you can write recursive algorithms in most any 
procedural language to handle those naturally recursive tasks when they 
come up.   With Lisp or <my-favorite-functional-language> you're pretty 
much /forced/ to look at everything recursively.  And I think that makes 
joe coder nervous, thus presenting a major hurdle to any functional 
language ever becoming truly popular.

My point is just that I don't think syntax is the *only* thing that's 
prevented lisp from becoming wildly popular.  If that were the case then 
the answer would be to simply create a different syntax for Lisp. 
(Actually, according to someone's comment here 
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1998 
it's been done and it's called Dylan, another not-wildly popular 
language).  So I think the problem is more fundamental.

--bb