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I don't know, hence my diplomatic silence. :-) I think it's to do with predictibility: back-compatibility, discoverability. You can get new coders who can get

I don't know, hence my diplomatic silence. :-) I think it's to do with predictibility: back-compatibility, discoverability. You can get new coders who can get up to speed on a codebase. Business customers - who really really want things to keep working - value that. And business customers ultimately decide what is used. Similar to your point. BTW I'm not even sure expert lisp programmers can easily maintain their own code (or, perhaps more importantly, would want to). Operator overloading: very cool, nice for matrices, complex numbers etc. But easily abused to create impenetrable code (you must first get across all the definitions). C++ had it, Java avoided it. Lisp is so flexible, it's like everything is an overloadable operator. I'm not aware of such research on lisp; but the only successful lisp projects I've heard of are with hot-shot coders. BTW: reddit was originaly written in lisp (inspired by pg, who gave them the idea for reddit); they switched to python.

bkeroack 11y ago
I suspect a lot of it is simply that it's one of the first "real" programming languages taught in universities and trade schools. People who get into software engineering purely pragmatically (their parents told them they could make a lot of money) but have no passion for the art simply default to it. It's why I always ask about favorite programming language in engineer interviews. It's not that there's a right answer, but I do expect to hear some nuanced opinions. If the candidate says "Java" and then looks at me like I'm a little crazy for asking, I know they probably aren't a good fit.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Yes, but trade schools and unis choose it because it's popular in industry (it's not particularly popular with academics). It's not an ideal teaching language, because of all the boilerplate of objects and packages when starting with procedures. C is a better teaching language in that respect (python might be the best).

bkeroack 11y ago

I suspect a lot of it is simply that it's one of the first "real" programming languages taught in universities and trade schools. People who get into software engineering purely pragmatically (their parents told them they could make a lot of money) but have no passion for the art simply default to it. It's why I always ask about favorite programming language in engineer interviews. It's not that there's a right answer, but I do expect to hear some nuanced opinions. If the candidate says "Java" and then looks at me like I'm a little crazy for asking, I know they probably aren't a good fit.

hyperpallium 11y ago
Yes, but trade schools and unis choose it because it's popular in industry (it's not particularly popular with academics). It's not an ideal teaching language, because of all the boilerplate of objects and packages when starting with procedures. C is a better teaching language in that respect (python might be the best).