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Don't have the link handy, but I think I read somewhere that someone calculated the number of characters or punctation (things like parens vs. braces, etc.) for
by vram22 8y ago
Don't have the link handy, but I think I read somewhere that someone calculated the number of characters or punctation (things like parens vs. braces, etc.) for some code using Lisp vs. C-style languages, and showed that (at least for some examples), Lisp code actually took less characters (or punctuation) in total.
- kamaal 8y agoAnother factor could be familiarity, by now people are so used to seeing C like syntax, any things else would feel automatically difficult attracting huge investments in time to learn. Also if most developers have to learn lisp, there have to be enough jobs.
- vram22 8y agoRight, good point. Sort of a chicken-or-egg situation. Also, this reminds me of Paul Graham's famous essay, Beating the Averages [1], about why and how he and his co-founders used Lisp at their startup Viaweb, which was later acquired by Yahoo! for ~40 million USD, IIRC. [1] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html I think it was this essay, along with his other one about the first summer school for founders (which later became Y Combinator), that attracted the attention of a lot of developers (some of whom later became successful YC applicants) and helped both YC and HN take off.