Does the Julia community suffer from the “Lisp curse” (whatever it means)?

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The Lisp curse is that the more expressive, powerful Lisp language doesn’t really get popular like the less expressive ones, maybe because of the lack of standardization, maybe because it’s easier to mess up? Maybe because it’s harder to document? We don’t know the validity of the Lisp curse nor the true cause, so it’s just a guess. Does it apply to Julia?

For:

  • Julia is really expressive.
  • Some complain about the correctness and documentation issues, maybe because Julia multiple dispatch, a more powerful paradigm, is also harder to document/test.
  • Julia ecosystem is composed of smaller independent libraries rather than a few big libraries. This means some libraries may be maintained by a few or even a single dev and can no longer be maintained once the dev is gone. The documentation may also be less complete because the developer team see things from fewer perspectives. Each library also imposes its own standard which can be different from each other.

Against:

  • Julia culture often induce challenge which means things don’t get “too easy”. The Greedy Julians don’t want to do something for less, they want to do more for the same. For example, they want to do source-to-source AD, inducing lots of difficulties. Maybe they want to optimize something to a ridiculous level. These can add difficulty, sometimes artificially, but it does make the library feel like something worth sharing.
  • Julia makes good generics which make library easier to make and use.

What do you think? The way I see is that I want expressive languages like Julia to truly succeed. So, if there is a problem, we need to know.

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I usually find myself cursing (well, I do not curse - but it sounds good in the context of List curse) at either myself or the language when failing to write enough tests.

I think that aggressively imposing a test writing discipline would do a lot of good to the future of the ecosystem (and also avoid the Lisp curse - whatever it means).

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For the uninitiate, the essay. It would be more funny if it were less true. Usually summarized as:

Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

Good programmers in a language find most concepts elsewhere easy to re-implement in their language of choice. When it is easy enough, nobody bothers to package or document it. It could be that the task was that easy, or because it is a pain to package and document it. Then you get a profusion of mediocre blobs of code that sort of fit the bill, but are buggy and undocumented - because the author doesn’t really care about it, or doesn’t have time anymore.

All languages suffer from this to some extent - it is not a “yes, cursed” or “no, not cursed” answer. Sure, Julia is very powerful, and it may be true that there are many disposable implementations of things floating around, but it seems like the curators of the language have really gone out of their way to make code easy to package and document.

I’d say, the curse taking root largely depends on the groups of people involved, and the vagaries of fate more so than the expressiveness of a language.

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