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Comment by pdimitar

I can gloss over LISP's lack of static strong typing and if I force myself a bit, I can also ignore it not producing small efficient native binaries... but the lack of (semi-)transparent concurrency / parallelism is my deal-breaker. Multicore CPUs are a fact for life for a long time now.

Where is the stuff like Erlang/Elixir's green threads or Golang's goroutines/channels and Rust's async runtimes workers/channels, and OCaml 5.0's recent multicore runtime (and the emerging libraries around it)?

People have been quick to point out various old-school multithreading libraries in the past but as a guy who was working with `pthreads` almost instantly after he started his career 21+ years ago... yeah, nope, I want the higher-level stuff. I want to solve problems and not invent a new async orchestration runtime for every project I work on.

If LISP is so fantastic why isn't there a serious effort to make it multicore-friendly? Where's the transparent concurrency and parallelism? The actor runtime? The [stateful] effect handlers?

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Believe it or not, I understand the value of inventing your own DSL and that solving business problems with it is much easier compared to coding it in another programming language but (a) nobody wants to pay me for that because that way I make myself irreplaceable and business is extremely against this and (b) that solution might end up being non-extendable, rigid and a dead-end. So it's a high-risk endeavor in more ways than one.

So OK, LISP is awesome. I tried it, liked it, couldn't find a way to make money with it. I suspect many other programmers are in my boat.

If you want more adoption then do the grunt work and bring it to 2023. Give us an HTTP (1.x & 2.0) and WebSockets libraries, give us an actor runtime (or a goroutine-like one), maybe an optional type checker -- and I am sure the community can very easily pick it up afterwards and lift it up to big heights.

No? Then it remains a niche curiosity. Enlightenment does not have to always go hand-in-hand with being a spartan. I want libraries.

parent pdimitar 3 years ago

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