He certainly implies that he thinks Common Lisp (and maybe Dylan) would have been as popular as Java is today if the lottery had played out differently.
I wonder if anyone else feels this way. The programming world would be a different place.
I can’t help but fantasize about how incredible eMacs would be by now if that had been the case. (Not that it isn’t already incredible.)
I think S-expressions are fundamentally too difficult to work with, without good editor support, to make Lisp anything other than a niche power tool for the highly motivated. I love CL, Scheme, Clojure, Janet, Fennel, etc. but I don't blame anyone for finding them inaccessible.
I think Python, JavaScript, and Go have caught on for somewhat similar reasons, compared to Java and C#: they are easier to get started with, and you can still scale them up to fairly large applications.
On the other hand, I think S-expressions are a sadly underexplored format for data serialization and storage.
I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses. Many languages require them in ad-hoc ways to groups expressions. For S-expressions, you give up some mild convenience and looks for extremely consistent semantics.
> I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses
A common refrain from Lisp family language enthusiasts. (Personally I prefer Smalltalk-style "conversational" syntax to Lisp-style or C-style syntax, yet it's similarly unpopular.)
For better or for worse, the vast majority of programmers seem to have voted with their feet for C-style syntax (C/C++/Java/JavaScript/etc.) and its variants (Python). In a C/C++/Java/JavaScript world, C syntax has a fair amount of leverage.
It's a shame that Dylan didn't continue, as it seems to have taken a decent crack at adding algebraic syntax to Common Lisp - arguably realizing McCarthy's original vision of infix M-expressions as a more programmer-friendly syntax. I wonder how hard it would be to add a Dylan-style syntax layer to modern CL?
Be that as it may, one can readily write Lisp/Scheme-style programs in JavaScript. See Crockford's "The Little JavaScripter."[1] The major omission/deficiency being macros for JavaScript syntax.
(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.
As a Guix developer (there's a lot of Scheme and Common Lisp in Guix :) ), every few years I check on Open Dylan but so far each time there was something missing that made me unable to package it for Guix (building it entirely from source).
I've checked it a few minutes ago and Open Dylan's ./configure says to download a bootstrap compiler from https://opendylan.org/download/index.html first -- but there's no such bootstrap compiler there.
Do you have some hints on how to package it?
There's no special "bootstrap compiler"; you can download a binary release for your platform from the page you linked, and then use that to bootstrap a newer version from a source checkout. If it would help, we could provide a minimalistic build that was only useful for bootstrapping, but at present our builds are "batteries included" (with LLVM/Clang and the BDW garbage collector already provided in the tarball).
So for Dylan, we'd like to have a compiler for Open Dylan, not written in Dylan. (it can also require multiple steps to get up to Open Dylan--that would be fine)
It's not in the interest of our users to use binary blob compilers for bootstrapping.
We would also unbundle LLVM, clang and the bdw gc and use the ones from Guix.