Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
Let's start by acknowledging one external factor that does affect the popularity of a programming language. To become popular, a programming language has to be the scripting language of a popular system. Fortran and Cobol were the scripting languages of early IBM mainframes. C was the scripting language of Unix, and so, later, was Perl. Tcl is the scripting language of Tk. Java and Javascript are intended to be the scripting languages of web browsers.
Lisp is not a massively popular language because it is not the scripting language of a massively popular system. What popularity it retains dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of MIT. A lot of the great programmers of the day were associated with MIT at some point. And in the early 1970s, before C, MIT's dialect of Lisp, called MacLisp, was one of the only programming languages a serious hacker would want to use.
Today Lisp is the scripting language of two moderately popular systems, Emacs and Autocad, and for that reason I suspect that most of the Lisp programming done today is done in Emacs Lisp or AutoLisp.
Programming languages don't exist in isolation. To hack is a transitive verb-- hackers are usually hacking something-- and in practice languages are judged relative to whatever they're used to hack. So if you want to design a popular language, you either have to supply more than a language, or you have to design your language to replace the scripting language of some existing system.
Common Lisp is unpopular partly because it's an orphan. It did originally come with a system to hack: the Lisp Machine. But Lisp Machines (along with parallel computers) were steamrollered by the increasing power of general purpose processors in the 1980s. Common Lisp might have remained popular if it had been a good scripting language for Unix. It is, alas, an atrociously bad one.
One way to describe this situation is to say that a language isn't judged on its own merits. Another view is that a programming language really isn't a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of something. This only seems unfair if it comes as a surprise. I think it's no more unfair than expecting a programming language to have, say, an implementation. It's just part of what a programming language is.
A programming language does need a good implementation, of course, and this must be free. Companies will pay for software, but individual hackers won't, and it's the hackers you need to attract.
A language also needs to have a book about it. The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples. K&R is the ideal here. At the moment I'd almost say that a language has to have a book published by O'Reilly. That's becoming the test of mattering to hackers.
There should be online documentation as well. In fact, the book can start as online documentation. But I don't think that physical books are outmoded yet. Their format is convenient, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter. Bookstores are one of the most important places for learning about new languages.
3 BrevityGiven that you can supply the three things any language needs-- a free implementation, a book, and something to hack-- how do you make a language that hackers will like?
One thing hackers like is brevity. Hackers are lazy, in the same way that mathematicians and modernist architects are lazy: they hate anything extraneous. It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.
It is a mistake to try to baby the user with long-winded expressions that are meant to resemble English. Cobol is notorious for this flaw. A hacker would consider being asked to write
add x to y giving z
instead of
z = x+y
as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God.
It has sometimes been said that Lisp should use first and rest instead of car and cdr, because it would make programs easier to read. Maybe for the first couple hours. But a hacker can learn quickly enough that car means the first element of a list and cdr means the rest. Using first and rest means 50% more typing. And they are also different lengths, meaning that the arguments won't line up when they're called, as car and cdr often are, in successive lines. I've found that it matters a lot how code lines up on the page. I can barely read Lisp code when it is set in a variable-width font, and friends say this is true for other languages too.
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