Last several months I've been going down the lisp rabbit hole again. I really really love this family of programming languages and I'm sad things like C and Javascript became the widely used standards instead. Lisp is really fun but in this modern world of everything being in a container and no trusted by default I doubt it'll ever become mainstream again. But I can dream... I really wish we were all using lisp machines instead of unix.

The main issue I've found with using lisp for day-to-day work are the 1 million different dialects and the fact that they don't always mesh well together. For example;

GNU Shepherd is probably the best init I've used on the unix-like OSs. It's written in Scheme and I really like it. Pairs well with the best package manager I've used on unix (Guix). Thankfully, they were designed to work together. Shepherd just reached version 1.0 finally and Guix is becoming pretty stable as well even on non-free systems. But GNU hosts both projects and they've been under constant ddos attacks since last year. So some days it's impossible to pull down fresh packages or substitutes (their term for pre-compiled binaries). I ran Guix as my primary OS for several months and I really liked it. Much better than the Nix eco-system. But I eventually got tired of having to compile so much locally due to the constant ddos attacks (kernel+browser updates every few days became painful).

Then there is Stumpwm. Which is a tiling WM written in another lisp dialect. It's in common lisp. I really like it as well and it's probably the best WM I've used. But it still suffers from multi-monitor support not being 100% yet. Configuration through common lisp and being able to re-configure in real time without restarting/recompiling is great. I eventually ended up going back to dwm for now because it does what I need and hardly changes at all. I needed the multi-monitor support even on my laptop.

Emacs is of course the best text editor and its been around for a long time. I do a lot in it beyond editing text. It's the best front-end for git that I've found (magit). But it uses yet another lisp dialect (elisp) and suffers from its own long standing problems like no true multi-threading. In practice it isn't that big of a deal and ctrl+g gets me out of any hang most of the time. But from time to time it'll hard lock and I have to manually kill it.

As an aside for a few months before I switched to stumpwm I was using EXWM. Which meant emacs was my entire window manager. I really really liked this and I wish I could have stuck with it. But it doesn't work that great for the couple of mouse/input device driven applications I use and the lack of multi-threading support was sometimes painful. If one application in the background froze so did my entire desktop until it finished doing whatever it was doing to block it.

I just wish the lisp world wasn't so segmented and all of the above used a common dialect. The idea of being able to modify anything running in software on my machine in real time is very appealing. But I don't want to remember 4+ dialects to do it. Ironically, modern GUIs are basically the same thing the lisp machines were. Except they're centered around a javascript interpreter instead of a lisp interpreter.

The lisp machines were tossed aside back in the day due to bad performance compared to C stuff like Unix and the fact that a bunch of different companies tried to cash-in on them instead of working together. When I got started learning programming lisp was considered pretty much dead outside of emacs and people said it wasn't worth using. So it's kind of nice seeing it make a bit of a come back lately. I just wish it didn't happen so late.

Anyone else here a lisp addict?