People use JS over other languages because they have no choice (transpile to JS languages are relatively rare, and TypeScript only succeeded because it's a superset of JS), I'd imagine Scheme would be treated the same way.
Disagree. I think JS is ubiquitous in part because the language maintainers are willing to adopt new syntax and borrow concepts from other languages, and therefore keep the language modern and accessible.
For example, CoffeeScript was everywhere about 10 years ago. If someone had told me then that in 5 years it would be dead, and in 10 years new devs would not have even heard of it, I wouldn’t have believed it. CoffeesScript died largely because JS adopted most of the innovations Coffee brought to the table in ES2015/ES6, thus Coffee became unnecessary.
I didn’t say otherwise. I’m actually much more proficient in Clojure than I am in JS in part for that reason.
Still, JS has come a long way in the past 10 years, which is impressive. When I need to write JS, I’m glad the days when I needed to use Underscore just to get map, reduce, etc. are long gone.
Languages with Java-like syntaxt are much more popular than LISPs in general even not taking JS into account. I think it’s just more intuitive to parse it in human brain, at least to me.
What is most intuitive to you is what you're used to. There's a lot of people that find Lisps syntax intuitive, and becoming familiar with it is mostly just part of the process of using it. All programming languages look foreign to the untrained eye.
Languages with Java-like syntax are taught in schools, and Lisp typically isn't.
I've written some Lisp and I don't find the syntax hard to read, so much as my unfamiliarity with the language itself (what does cons do? What kind of args does it take?).
Plus the occasional cluster migraine when I decide to write a macro, knowing that I'm lucky when regular code runs right the first time. Not really a fault of Lisp, I'm sure me trying to write C++ templates would end about the same.
> Languages with Java-like syntax are taught in schools, and Lisp typically isn't.
Er, my experience is that Lisp or Scheme is taught in literally every CS course out there. Not high-school maybe, but then again in high-school you typically don't get Java either - maybe Scratch, maybe Python.
I know on HN it's fashionable to be pro-LISP, but "it's not taught" is not one of the reasons LISP is not popular.
It wasn't on my curriculum, and I've only worked with one person who was remotely familiar with Lisp.
I've worked with more people that know Haskell than Lisp (though that seems like an outlier, I would guess Lisp/Scheme is still more popular than Haskell).
It's totally possible that I'm an outlier or that it's regional, but I haven't seen any indication that Lisp is commonly known.
It's debatable the extent to which JavaScript contributed to the ubiquity of the web for interactive applications, versus the extent to which interactive web applications contributed to the ubiquity of JavaScript.
But regardless of the historical reasons, JavaScript is now an extremely popular programming language for non-web applications.
Scheme is around today, and there are some pretty good implementations. But few people use it. Sometimes I suspect there are more Scheme implementations than Scheme users.
Lisp-style programming with s-expressions is just not very popular. Pure (or "pure-ish") functional programming in general just isn't.
I know some people really like functional programming and/or scheme, but the reality of the matter is that this never has been (and I suspect never will be) a mainstream opinion.
Functional programming is the Black Metal of programming. It's great and all, but will always be for a relatively small and niche audience.
And that's okay. Not everything needs to be large.
I think it would be adopted exactly as widely as JavaScript is. People choose JavaScript because it is supported by the browser, not because they think it has a beautiful syntax. If some other language has been supported instead (whether VBScript or Scheme or whatever), people would use that.
Semantic markup languages were niche until the web happened. Objective-C was a weird niche language until the iPhone app boom. People learn the languages they need to learn.
