Emacs and ANSI Common Lisp are both overwhelmingly popular. In the modern era (admittedly, closer to the start of the millenium), in Rob Pike’s famous Systems Software Research Is Dead talk, Pike complained that everyone he knew ten years before used emacs and unix, and at the time of the talk everyone he knew used emacs and unix. Strandh, writing a bit later specifically about lisp’s lack of popularity pointed out that lisp was the third most present programming language in the popular Debian distribution of linux, though highlighting that emacs lisp was more ascendent than common lisp due to emacs’s popularity and momentum as the elite code editor.
Moving forward within the modern era to very recently, it is not hard to point to examples of companies like HackerNews coming-home to ANSI Common Lisp citing quality differences to the other contenders courting them. This is the opposite to hypothetical languishing in obscurity. My personal observations include that Haskell has been leaking volume it took on as a hot new university idea from the 90s back to lisp (pers. obs.).
In my own clumsy and struggling adoption of Eduardo’s eev-mode I came across his own reassuring and deeply resonant point about explaining eev:
Lots of people have complained that they have tried to understand from the documentation what eev is and what eev does, but they have failed, and that, aham, I need to write a one-paragraph summary explaining that.
I’ve tried that for years. If you are sure that everything can be summarized in one paragraph, then **** OFF - you are wasting both your time and my time.
while other noted lisper Alan Perlis had a gentler (if more condescending) similar Perlisism
- When someone says “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,” give him a lollipop.
Eduardo’s eev has something to do with his own decades of original work on and using emacs lisp (and ansi common lisps) in a way where hyperlinking and arbitrary program useage should and can be realized as concise and arbitrary but completely scrutible and portable s-expressions and keyboard/controller literal interactions.
This sounds antagonistic to beginner-friendly material, and it is. In The Evolution Of Lisp, Steele et al. point out that lisp’s popularity in particular is found to come from its cachet (adopters’ perception of lisp as the elite language).
Here I have ended up in a different direction to where I expected, though I at least am somewhat convinced by my references here. Okay I have one more point.
I was talking to Kent Pitman after I interviewed him the other week, and he pointed out the slight embarrassment at people expecting to hear explanations of common lisp like it was designed by requirements analysis of megacompanieses popular ultraproducts, when it was in some ways literally the opposite of that- simply, a rock star cast of computing from its first four decades came together in a standardisation process to collaboratively make the best language they could. Okay, Kent often tells me that I am too liberal with paraphrasing him. Something like this was honestly said. This is actually an incredibly cachet origin story.
Ugh, why did I reference so many things.
See you at the show in 18 hours everyone.