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Common Lisp
Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 24 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Poor error messages slow down macro-based developmentUnreviewed
20092026- Badly expanded macros are tricky to debug2026-08-26
- Forgetting gen-sym causes code to work sometimes then fail strangely; macros are cumbersome to write2018-10-11
- Produces pretty bad error messages, making macro-based development slower2016-11-27
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 25 complaints
- Badly expanded macros are tricky to debug2026-08-26
- Lisp developer tooling has a terrible user experience problem2024-07-11
- Lots of parentheses are hard to read and deal with without good editor support2024-02-15
- Free implementations' REPL lacks built-in editing and history recall, so newbies need to learn an editor2024-02-15
- Excess parentheses make code hard to read, especially others' code2024-02-14
- Getting a database connection set up felt like pulling teeth2022-10-02
- Lisp tooling (ASDF, Quicklisp, Roswell) is obscure and lacks CLI task running2022-09-29
- Tutorials never explain how to look up what a function does2022-06-07
- Must remember which arguments are evaluated when a macro is the first symbol2022-05-24
- Unclear whether function arguments are passed by value or reference, surprising behavior2022-01-11
- Opaque abbreviated names for similar concepts make learning difficult2020-12-30
- Nested errors make it hard to figure out how to exit the error state2020-11-01
- Setting up a Common Lisp environment is hard for newcomers2020-06-20
- Forgetting gen-sym causes code to work sometimes then fail strangely; macros are cumbersome to write2018-10-11
- Lisp macros like LOOP have heavy internal syntax, making code look no simpler than other languages2018-07-14
- Tooling is complex; setup and running code is harder than in modern IDEs2018-05-10
- Produces pretty bad error messages, making macro-based development slower2016-11-27
- Macro syntax like LOOP, FORMAT and HANDLER-CASE is hard to get right and understand2016-11-21
- Many function names are extremely arcane and hard for beginners to understand2016-10-07
- Obscure syntax like #'- and mapcar is hard to read and learn2016-05-14
- Too many confusing install options, hard to choose a working one2015-11-28
- Loop macro syntax becomes convoluted and hard to follow2015-02-20
- Multiple inheritance and method combination are very difficult to use and impossible to master2014-11-13
- Opening brackets slow reading; must bracket-count to see where statements end2011-05-23
- Using let feels clumsy for people expecting simple assignment of temporary variables2009-04-07