On Friday 28 December 2007 11:05:12 Andrew Coppin wrote:
I thought Lisp and Erlang were both infinitely more popular and better known. Followed by Clean and O'Camal.
According to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity figures OCaml, Haskell and Erlang are the most popular general-purpose functional programming languages, followed by Lisp and Scheme: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-languages... OCaml, Haskell and Erlang are also growing much more rapidly than Lisp: http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=ocaml-nox%2Cghc6%2Cerlang-base%2Csbcl%2Cclisp&show_installed=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 However, both F# and Scala have the potential to dwarf all of these languages in the not-so-distant future. I believe F# will do so in 2008 but Scala will take 2-3 years because they have far fewer resources to develop essential tools like working IDE plug-ins.
[I actually heard a number of people tell me that learning LISP would change my life forever because LISP has something called "macros". I tried to learn it, and disliked it greatly. It's too messy. And what the heck is "cdr" ment to mean anyway? To me, LISP doesn't even seem all that different from normal languages (modulo weird syntax). Now Haskell... that's FUN!]
OCaml also has macros as well and, yes, forking the syntax of a language is a bad idea. I would have said that the metacircular evaluator was the most interesting aspect of Lisp/Scheme though, not macros. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e