Famous Programers on How Common Lisp Sucks

Guy L Steele

Guy L. Steele, Jr.'s foreword in Scheme and the Art of Programming.

I think we may usefully compare the approximate number of pages in the defining standard or draft standard for several programming languages:

  Common Lisp   1000 or more
  COBOL          810
  ATLAS          790
  Fortran 77     430
  PL/I           420
  BASIC          360
  ADA            340
  Fortran 8x     300
  C              220
  Pascal         120
  DIBOL           90
  Scheme          50

[Scheme and the Art of Programming 1989-10-30 By George Springer, Daniel P Friedman. At Buy at amazon ]

See also: Guy Steele Says: Don't Iterate, Recurse, and Get rid of lisp cons! .

Richard Stallman

Discussion of lisp, ~1979. https://ml.cddddr.org/info-lispm/threads.html#00305 we can see many lisp pioneers. Richard M Stallman, David A Moon, Richard Greenblatt, Guy L Steele, Richard Fateman, Dick Gabriel, Daniel L Weinreb, Kent M Pitman, Scott E Fahlman.

Rodney A Brooks, Richard P Gabriel

Every decision of the committee can be locally rationalized as the right thing. We believe that the sum of these decisions, however, has produced something greater than its parts; an unwieldy, overweight beast, with significant costs (especially on other than micro-codable personal Lisp engines) in compiler size and speed, in runtime performance, in programmer overhead needed to produce efficient programs, and in intellectual overload for a programmer wishing to be a proficient COMMON LISP programmer.

source [A Critique of Common Lisp 1984-12-30 By Rodney A Brooks and Richard P Gabriel. At http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/clcrit.pdf , accessed on 2012-05-12 ]

Rodney Brooks

Richard P Gabriel home page: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html

Richard Gabriel

“Common Lisp is a significantly ugly language. If Guy and I had been locked in a room, you can bet it wouldn't have turned out like that” — WESTEX 86 (or maybe 85).

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: jjac...@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs)
Date: 15 Dec 87 04:15:24 GMT
Subject: Re: FORTRAN,ADA
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/000c29799e6ee0d8

Paul Graham

Paul Graham (computer programmer)

Historically, Lisp has been good at letting hackers have their way. The political correctness of Common Lisp is an aberration. Early Lisps let you get your hands on everything.

A hacker's language needs powerful libraries and something to hack. Common Lisp has neither. A hacker's language is terse and hackable. Common Lisp is not.

The good news is, it's not Lisp that sucks, but Common Lisp.

source [Being Popular 2001-05-30 By Paul Graham. At http://paulgraham.com/popular.html , accessed on 2015-01-16 ]

Do you really think people in 1000 years want to be constrained by hacks that got put into the foundations of Common Lisp because a lot of code at Symbolics depended on it in 1988?

source [Y Store now C++ 2003-02-25 By Paul Graham. At http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02367.html , accessed on 2015-01-16 ]

Daniel Weinreb

Daniel Weinreb .

Having separate “value cells” and “function cells” (to use the “street language” way of saying it) was one of the most unfortuanate issues. We did not want to break pre-existing programs that had a global variable named “foo” and a global function named “foo” that were distinct. We at Symbolics were forced to insist on this, in the face of everyone's knowing that it was not what we would have done absent compatibility constraints. It's hard for me to remember all the specific things like this, but if we had had fewer compatibility issues, I think it would have come out looking more like Scheme in general.

source [Y Store now C++ 2003-02-28 By Daniel Weinreb. At http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02374.html , accessed on 2015-01-16 ]

Lisp2 means that all kinds of language primitives have to exist in two versions, or be parameterizable as to whether they are talking about the value cell or function cell. It makes the language bigger, and that's bad in and of itself.

source [Y Store now C++ 2003-02-28 By Daniel Weinreb. At http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02462.html , accessed on 2015-01-16 ]

See also: [Dan Weinreb: Loop 2012-09-08 By Dan Weinreb. At http://paulgraham.com/loop.html , accessed on 2015-01-16 ].

See also:

• What is Lisp-1, What's Lisp-2? Bad Jargon or Good Jargon?
• Lisp Programer Daniel Weinreb Died (1959 to 2012)

Gilles Kahn

Gilles Kahn (1946 to 2006):

To this day I have not forgotten that Common Lisp killed Lisp, and forced us to abandon a perfectly good system, LeLisp.

Jeffrey M. Jacobs

(I couldn't find info about Jeffrey M Jacobs. He might not be a notable lisper)

Common LISP is the PL/I of Lisps. Too big and too incomprehensible, with no examiniation of the real world of software engineering.

CL is a nightmare; it has effectively killed LISP development in this country. It is not commercially viable and has virtually no future outside of the traditional academic/defense/research arena. It should be embarassing to everybody in the field that most shells and tools are no longer written in LISP.

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: jjac...@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs)
Date: 15 Dec 87 04:15:24 GMT
Subject: Re: FORTRAN,ADA
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/000c29799e6ee0d8

One of the key issues that I consider distinguishes “Real LISP” from Common LISP is indeed the strong committment to the equivalence of data (meaning list structures) and code. I consider this idea one of the foundations of “Real LISP”, and Common LISP intent is vague at best. InterLISP, for example, still makes a declaration of this philosophy in the manual, and it is still one of the keystones in the teaching of LISP (although whether it should be when teaching Common LISP is open to question).

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: jjac...@well.UUCP
Date: Sat, 21-Feb-87 22:17:41 EST
Local: Sat, Feb 21 1987 8:17 pm
Subject: Common LISP Scoping and Variables
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/264e2baeb5df2eb0

I think CL is the WORST thing that could possibly happen to LISP. In fact, I consider it a language different from “true” LISP.

*****

… The CL effort resembles a bunch of spoiled children, each insisting “include my feature or I'll pull out, and then we'll all go down the tubes”. Everybody had vested interests, both financial and emotional.

Chez Bernard Lang

(I couldn't find info about Chez Bernard Lang)

Common Lisp did kill Lisp. Period. (just languages take a long time dying …) It is to Lisp what C++ is to C. A monstrosity that totally ignores the basics of language design, simplicity and orthogonality to begin with.

Reference

The Evolution of Lisp, table of contents

• Introduction
• Implementation Projects Chronology
• From Lisp 1.5 to PDP-6 Lisp: 1960–1965
• MacLisp
• Interlisp
• The Early 1970’s
• The Demise of the PDP-10
• Lisp Machines
• IBM Lisps: Lisp360 and Lisp370
• Scheme: 1975–1980
• Prelude to Common Lisp: 1980–1984
• Early Common Lisp
• Other Stock Hardware Dialects: 1980–1984
• Standards Development: 1984–1990

Evolution of Some Specific Language Features

• The Treatment of NIL (and T)
• Iteration
• Macros
• Numerical Facilities
• Some Notable Failures
• Lisp as a Language Laboratory
• Why Lisp is Diverse

[The Evolution of Lisp 1993 By Guy L Steele Jr., Richard P Gabriel. At http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Hopl2.pdf , accessed on 2015-09-22 ]