Rumours of my death

When I first used Lisp, the common refrain was that Lisp was dead.

There was a single free implementation of CL (which required you to physically sign a license of some kind and return it, in exchange for a tape) which was deficient in many respects. The two or three commercial implementations cost about a year’s salary each. Enormous effort had been spent on implementations which ran on special hardware. One variant of these cost more than your house: the other rather less, but turned out to have been implemented by the fey — you seriously did not want to spend too much time with it if you did not want problems involving having your firstborn somehow changed into a strange and somehow absent creature.

(And there was a terrible, unspeakable truth about even the expensive hardware: the people who implemented it didn’t understand computer performance very well with the result you would expect. The systems were faster than a VAX, but everything was faster than a VAX, including some PDP–11s. A Sun 3/260 ate them alive, and you could buy several of those for the cost of a house, with bundled licenses.)

Performance was pretty grim: of course nothing was fast on machines that, on a good day, could execute a few million instructions a second, but Lisp implementations were problematic at best. You spent a lot of time turning recursive code into iterative code by hand and writing macros (no inlining) to get performance to be reasonable and worrying about the primitive garbage collectors.

There was no standard: existing implementations differed in basic details like error handling (not in the aluminium book) and a standard object system was a distant dream. The news from the standards committee was ominous: the special-hardware people were exerting pressure and there were serious worries that the object system would not be efficiently implementable on stock hardware. The language was going to be huge.

Standard or semi-standard libraries were not really thought of.

Everyone knew Lisp was dead: the coming thing was, perhaps, Scheme — tail-call elimination in the language, a small language (yet MIT Scheme somehow had a bigger footprint than the CLs we used) — or C++ or some functional language whose name no-one now remembers. But Lisp was dead: no question about it.

Fast forward.

I have two high-quality CL implementations on my machine and one Scheme-derived system, also of very high quality, which created this blog: I have long ago stopped counting the number of good-quality free implementations. One of the implementations I use is commercial: the annual support is about 10% of my monthly rent. I can run dozens of instances of each without the machine noticing, and I could happily run a full CL development system on a system less powerful and smaller than my phone. Performance is a solved problem: yes, highly-optimised code is, perhaps, slower than optimised C or Fortran but since almost all performance problems are design problems no-one older than about 19 cares any more. CL has an advanced, performant and standard object system and, in effect, a standard metaobject system as well. The library problem has been solved by Quicklisp and a large number of good-quality standard libraries. I am still using code I wrote over twenty-five years ago with essentially no modification: meanwhile the Python code I wrote ten years ago is long rendered obsolete by gratuitous changes in the language (the Perl code I wrote at the same time is doing fine, however).

And yet still the cry goes up: Lisp is dead; Lisp is dead.