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0 pointsklodolph10y ago0 comments

I think this is important. Probably because I have the "worse is better" article from 1991 open in another tab, and if you s/Lisp/Javascript/g then many of the criticisms ring true. Some of what made Unix, Windows, and Mac OS healthy environments for development was the fact that all developers were equally well off, you didn't have to pay a tax for writing something in a language other than Lisp. You could keep your Fortran code, and mix it into a C program, run from a Bourne shell, running in terminal emulator written in C and a WM written in Lisp. You can replace any part with a part written in a different language.

JavaScript will continue to be dominant, but we desperately need to be able to write things in the language of our choice.

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nostrademons10y ago

Hmm? You paid a huge tax in desktop development for writing in a language other than the one the OS was written in. All of the platform documentation & examples were in its "native" language. You usually had to marshall data structures yourself to fit the data formats of the native language. You had to write shims (oftentimes in assembly!) that would bridge the calling conventions of your preferred language to those that the frameworks were written in.

There's a reason that C became the dominant language during the 80s and early 90s: it's because Win32, UNIX, and MacOS >=7 were all written in it. That's a large part of what Worse is Better was about. Richard Gabriel founded a company to write software for Lisp Machines, pivoted it to run Lisp on commodity hardware, found that all of his customers would rather just write in C, pivoted it again to do a C++ dev environment, and eventually went out of business.

The renaissance for other languages was really during the web era, when everything just spit out HTML and it didn't matter what the server was written in. Once customers started demanding rich interactivity on the client, there was a strong incentive to write everything in Javascript, and then a strong incentive to write the servers in Javascript too, and then a strong incentive to use Javascript for other things like native apps and IoT devices too.

klodolphOP10y ago

Yes, you paid a tax. But my argument here is that the tax for writing in different languages on Win32, Unix, and Mac OS was far cheaper than the tax for writing in other languages on a Lisp machine. This is because translating low-level code to high-level code is not as straightforward as the reverse operation. For example, if I compile C to JavaScript, how do I even think about writing a function like memcpy()? You end up with a monster like asm.js where interacting with the DOM is a chore.

Yes, the web brought a renaissance in different languages. But we already had a bunch of different languages lying around when the web became important. We were already using different languages to write desktop software. I didn't even learn C until the late 1990s, but I was happily writing software before then.

WebAssembly is going to make languages other than JavaScript palatable in the browser, and I can only see that as a good thing.

lispm10y ago

> Richard Gabriel founded a company to write software for Lisp Machines,

The company Gabriel founded (Lucid Inc.) was never supposed to write software for Lisp Machines. Its mission from day zero was to develop a Common Lisp implementation for stock hardware (SUNs, etc.). Symbolics, the Lisp Machine maker, refused to fund a portable Common Lisp implementation (which Gabriel and Benson, the latter then at Symbolics, proposed).

> found that all of his customers would rather just write in C, pivoted it again to do a C++ dev environment, and eventually went out of business

Actually the Lisp business of Lucid Inc. financed the C++ development.

It was a gamble. They easily could have continued to develop and sell Common Lisp (their main competitors from that time, Franz Inc. and LispWorks are still alive) and stay in a small/shrinking niche. But Lucid tried to diversify and to grow. The idea was to write a C++ environment with a similar and improved development experience as a Lisp system. They used the cash cow they had and eventually sunk the whole company when the C++ system flopped in the market. Their C++ system (Energize) was very expensive, technically complex, ...

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