Comment by neilv

Comment by neilv 17 hours ago

1 reply

Today, one of the remaining appeals of Lisps (e.g., CL, Scheme) is that (aside perhaps from Clojure) they're not very employable, and so the communities and ecosystems are more old-school hardcore in sensibility.

In Python, I have to really get on a roll on a project in it, to where I can ignore most of the unfortunate aspects, that are apparent when having to Web search through writing and code that seems 99.99% by people who wouldn't be doing this if it didn't pay money. Many are skilled and professional and conscientious, despite the circumstances of it being a job, but that's not the norm.

In JavaScript universe, jeebus, you can't read about even the smallest things, without it cavalierly telling you to install a supply chain disaster from NPM.

In Rust, some of their linguistic thinking is appealing. They still have the positive-employability problem, :) but the difficulty has a gatekeeping effect that isn't entirely unwelcome (if you only want a job, just learn JavaScript or Python). I can foresee flexing some of my systems programming skills like I haven't been able to as much in Python, JavaScript, or Scheme, to build efficient and trustworthy software. But then, for example, the other day, I thought "I'll try this UI package, which is a wrapper around a platform Web rendering widget, since maybe they found a sweet spot..." But somehow, "hello, world" requires compiling 503 Rust crates, just for the wrapper alone, not counting the code for the non-Rust platform Web widget that the they wrap. We already know that the platform widget is going to be buggy with memory errors and design flaws, and we're going to be running bloated Web stack atop that widget, and with callouts to Rust code, and how many people in the world can even reason about debugging that (or auditing it!), just to display simple GUI widgets in a fashionable way.

rhabarba 7 hours ago

> Today, one of the remaining appeals of Lisps (e.g., CL, Scheme) is that (aside perhaps from Clojure) they're not very employable, and so the communities and ecosystems are more old-school hardcore in sensibility.

One of the reasons why I wrote 42links in Lisp is that it’s less likely to end up in a ChatGPT reply without any license hints.