Marcus KammerMar 22
i feel like #lisp is dying more and more. the more AI is used by people the more irrelevant becomes the programming language.
Show threadSimon Brooke

@metalisp Why?

It seems to me, on the contrary, that #Lisp is in as good health as I have seen it any time these past fifty years. #Clojure is booming, and sprouting offshoots like #Scittle and Jank; Emacs Lisp and Scheme are still widely used; and there are lots of people playing with new, experimental Lisps. Common Lisp, even, seems particularly favoured by arts programmers.

It all looks pretty vibrant.

Mar 22 at 9:10pmWeb
Show threadcurtosisMar 22

@simon_brooke @metalisp In a world where most code is throwaway and you don’t care about humans understanding it, language might not matter much.

In the places where code matters and communicating precisely with humans for understanding is critical, though, the language matters very much. And the Lisps have always shone there, and may be part of the current renaissance.

Show threadSean CorfieldMar 23
@curtosis @simon_brooke @metalisp Given the terse nature of #Lisp languages and their regularity, they're very suited to generation by AI and they use fewer tokens than other languages.
Show threadbenMar 23
@simon_brooke @metalisp I seem to hear this from “AI” fans regarding just about every language, and I’m yet to see any evidence that any of those languages are actually declining yet as a result. Even if it might be true in future it doesn’t seem like we’re at a point yet where “AI” can have a significant impact on choice of language or long-term trajectories of languages.
Show threadPete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫Mar 23

@benjamineskola @simon_brooke @metalisp

My theory is the more code is available to train LLMs in a particular language, the less "good" it will be at producing output that looks plausible, so fewer people will ask code generation tools to produce their desired ideas in that language.

AI boosters will say the language is "dying", but human skill in that language will be thriving more than the ones with steadily-increasing slop pollution.

Show threadbenMar 23

@petealexharris @simon_brooke @metalisp I should add that part of my assumption here is that 90% of claims about "AI" are bollocks, and that's when I'm feeling generous.

But even if it's true that "AI" will eventually replace all programming, that clearly hasn't happened yet, and I haven't even seen signs of it starting.

(But maybe that's also because I'm not looking at the worst-affected languages. I think it probably also is true that if this *was* happening, Lisp would be affected less, or more slowly, than some of the more commercially-popular languages.)

Show threadPete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫Mar 23
@benjamineskola @simon_brooke @metalisp
Yeah, if you see some Erlang in the wild, a human probably wrote it. This cannot be said confidently of, say, Java.
Show threadSimon BrookeMar 23
@petealexharris @benjamineskola @metalisp aye. This is probably a good reason, in these fallen days, to prefer things written in less popular languages: there is a strong possibility that some human, somewhere, at sometime, intended it to do something and could give a reasonable account of what that something was, and how that code was expected to accomplish it.
Show threadAsllopMar 24
@simon_brooke @metalisp I might not be representative, but here it goes: after almost 30 years programming, I'm starting to use lisp (clojure) for one of my projects, and I'm absolutely loving it.