Old Lisp posts are cool, then if you want a refresher of what's happening in the CL ecosystem (tools, libraries, compilers…) here's an overview of the last two years (shameless plug): https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... and very cool new projects appeared in 2025.

It occurred to me this morning that I should learn Clojure instead of Rust for non-lowlevel code because Clojure solves the same problems Rust solves in a much simpler way. I'm a fan of Clojure author Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk but otherwise don't know either language in detail and need to do more research.

I'm curious why Lisp didn't gain mass popularity despite its advantages. In fact, I was wondering if it's popularity has event decreased in the past decade or so. I remember in the 2000s and even early 2010s, there were active discussion on Clojure, Scheme, and functional/logic programming in general. There seems much less discussion or usage nowadays. One theory is that popular languages have absorbed many features of functional programming, so the mainstream programmers do not feel the need to switch. My pet theory is that many of us mortals get the productivity boost from the ecosystem, in particular powerful libraries and frameworks. Given that, the amazing features of lisp, such as its s-expression, may not be powerful enough to sway users to switch.

It’s cool how people keep finding new joy in old ideas like Lisp. Shows that good design never really dies.

> It seems to me that LISP will probably be superseded for many purposes by a language that does to LISP what LISP does to machine language. Namely it will be a higher level language than LISP that, like LISP and machine language, can refer to its own programs. (However, a higher level language than LISP might have such a large declarative component that its texts may not correspond to programs. If what replaces the interpreter is smart enough, then the text written by a user will be more like a declarative description of the facts about a goal and the means available for attaining it than a program per se).

Pretty accurate foresight in 1980, in the "Mysteries and other Matters" section McCarthy predicting declarative textual description replacing lisp as a higher-level programming language, basically describing todays LLMs and agentic coding.

We know in hindsight that lisp became most useful for representing computation, but what ever happened to AI? McCarthy says it's characteristic of LISP. SICP also mentions AI as being fundamental to lisp at the beginning of the book. Norvig & Russel used Common Lisp for the first edition of their book. But, then what happened? Why did it just disappear for no reason?

nice, I was hacking common lisp this weekend.

Also this video was interesting, Oral History of John McCarthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuU82i3hi8c&t=1564s

I think when programmers are introduced to languages, most grok procedural ones easier than functional ones, hence Lisp and its derivatives have struggled in popularity for decades.

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