November 2, 2025
Parens vs. Pragmatists
Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)
Lisp’s comeback debate: legends, new fans, and a Clojure vs Rust plot twist
TLDR: McCarthy’s 1980 essay says Lisp is powerful but crusty and hints something even higher-level could surpass it. The comments ignite over whether to pick Clojure over Rust, if functional styles scare beginners, and whether modern tools already fulfill McCarthy’s prophecy—while fans show Common Lisp is still very much alive.
A 1980 time capsule from Lisp’s creator John McCarthy just blew up the comments: he called Lisp a “near‑best” language that needs its barnacles scraped, better shared libraries, and said we could even prove program correctness—then teased a future language that could out‑Lisp Lisp. The crowd went wild. One user had a shower thought moment: skip Rust for everyday work and learn Clojure instead because it “solves the same problems… simpler,” sparking a simplicity vs. safety scuffle and a rush to Rich Hickey’s talk. Another commenter dropped the spicy quote from McCarthy about a “higher level” language that can talk about its own code, and the thread asked: are we there yet, or still dreaming? Meanwhile, a reality check: many say people just learn step‑by‑step styles easier than function‑mathy ones, fueling the eternal “parentheses allergy” meme.
Old‑schoolers flexed receipts too: “I was hacking Common Lisp this weekend,” plus an Oral History video link, while a “shameless plug” roundup of 2023–2024 Common Lisp tools and libraries dropped to prove the scene’s alive. The vibe: McCarthy predicted the drama, the barnacle‑scraping became a meme, and the community is split between “Lisp forever,” “Clojure now,” and “something even higher is coming.”
Key Points
- •LISP is characterized as an approximate local optimum among programming languages, explaining its 21-year survival at the time.
- •The paper calls for removing accumulated complexities (“barnacles”) from LISP.
- •Cooperative maintenance and the creation/maintenance of program libraries are recommended to improve LISP’s ecosystem.
- •Computer-checked proofs of program correctness are possible for pure LISP and some extensions.
- •Further theory and smoothing of the language are needed to fully exploit LISP’s mathematical basis; the paper was included in the 1980 Lisp conference at Stanford.