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I don't want to knock Lisp, or any other exotic language choices. They have their benefits, people have built successful things with them, and learning a diffe

I don't want to knock Lisp, or any other exotic language choices. They have their benefits, people have built successful things with them, and learning a different way of doing things can expand your thinking as a developer. On the other hand, most of the world's most complex systems are built in boring choices like C, C++, Java, or Python. The claim that this or that can only have been built or get to market fast enough if it's in Lisp doesn't pass the smell test for me.

teataster 5y ago
A) I would say lisps are rather boring. Clojure, one of the most recent ones hasn't changed in 15 years. B) most systems are built in C, Java, Python. So no wonder most complex systems are written in those.
dunefox 5y ago
There is significant 'political' pressure to use whatever is already used and has the libraries. That's C, C++, Java, etc. most of the time. If the libraries and tools were truly language independent then I'm certain more companies would choose languages like CL more frequently for their merits.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, as the Italians say, "yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle."
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  "Whatever already has the libraries" isn't political. It's technical. It's thousands of lines of code that you don't have to write, and don't have to debug, and don't have to maintain. And having relevant libraries is (at least part of) "the merits".
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    There's a huge ecosystem of old Java code that is fully usable from Scala or Clojure, including stuff like bindings for native SQLite. Good FFI lets us move beyond old languages.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Don’t know about Clojure but in Scala that tends to be awkward and not preferred.
      - raspasov 5y ago
        From Clojure, Java interop is pretty smooth in most cases. Perhaps Clojure being dynamic helps in that regard.
        emodendroket 5y ago
        It's not that it won't work; it's that the idioms Scala is written with are different than Java, so having Java-like code mixed in messes up the coherence of the project. Not such an obstacle that you wouldn't ever do it, but enough that you'd prefer one designed for Scala if it is available.
    - dunefox 5y ago
      Also there's ABCL. Yet, I have never personally been in a company or heard of a colleague where they were allowed to deviate from Java or C#. Many times it was a struggle to even get IntelliJ licenses.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Right, but at some point, Python didn’t have all those libraries. But it did have a growing community who wanted to write them, even when it was to wrap perform at C++ or Fortran code.

teataster 5y ago

A) I would say lisps are rather boring. Clojure, one of the most recent ones hasn't changed in 15 years. B) most systems are built in C, Java, Python. So no wonder most complex systems are written in those.

dunefox 5y ago

There is significant 'political' pressure to use whatever is already used and has the libraries. That's C, C++, Java, etc. most of the time. If the libraries and tools were truly language independent then I'm certain more companies would choose languages like CL more frequently for their merits.

emodendroket 5y ago
Well, as the Italians say, "yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle."
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
"Whatever already has the libraries" isn't political. It's technical. It's thousands of lines of code that you don't have to write, and don't have to debug, and don't have to maintain. And having relevant libraries is (at least part of) "the merits".
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  There's a huge ecosystem of old Java code that is fully usable from Scala or Clojure, including stuff like bindings for native SQLite. Good FFI lets us move beyond old languages.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Don’t know about Clojure but in Scala that tends to be awkward and not preferred.
    - raspasov 5y ago
      From Clojure, Java interop is pretty smooth in most cases. Perhaps Clojure being dynamic helps in that regard.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        It's not that it won't work; it's that the idioms Scala is written with are different than Java, so having Java-like code mixed in messes up the coherence of the project. Not such an obstacle that you wouldn't ever do it, but enough that you'd prefer one designed for Scala if it is available.
  - dunefox 5y ago
    Also there's ABCL. Yet, I have never personally been in a company or heard of a colleague where they were allowed to deviate from Java or C#. Many times it was a struggle to even get IntelliJ licenses.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Right, but at some point, Python didn’t have all those libraries. But it did have a growing community who wanted to write them, even when it was to wrap perform at C++ or Fortran code.