4 ms·

Why? Is there a reason other than "most people don't know lisp and it's cheaper not to teach them?

• bmitc 5y ago
  In my experience, companies are deathly afraid of doing something even perceived as different when it comes to software. And my experience has been at places developing advanced novel hardware, so I would always try to point out the discrepancy. Why are people willing to try new things and train on advanced hardware projects but software gets relegated to the least common denominator? If it's not Python, C, or C++, it's a hard sell to try anything else, no matter the many multipliers that could come from switching.
  • zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Could it be a lack of trust in the capability for learning new (old) things? The thinking, that a software developer is but a script kiddy?
    • Jach 5y ago
      I wish it were so simple, yet I think the rapid advances in the last 10 years or so in Java, C++, and JavaScript, which developers have been expected to learn and keep up with, are sufficient to more than cast doubt on that. The changes on whole are nearly broad enough to count as new languages. If that's not enough, then there's the mobile development side of things, which have seen actual language shifts in Objective C to Swift and Old Java to Kotlin.
  • bcrosby95 5y ago
    I think it makes sense. When I start a new project, I tend to limit the number of risks I'm taking at a time. If I'm using a brand new language, I'm probably not going to also use a brand new database. If I'm going into a brand new domain I'm completely ignorant of, I'm going to use non-risky tech. And so on.
• xenomachina 5y ago
  That's probably part of it. Another possible factor: When I was at Google there was a similar phenomenon where any sufficiently complicated Python system seemed to get reimplemented in something with static types. A problem we had with Python (and I imagine this would be true of most Lisps -- yes, I know typed Racket exists) was that once a system got too big to keep in your head all at once, large-scale refactoring became almost impossible without the help of static types.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    I agree that static types is certainly a barrier. My day job is in a dynamic language for the first time ever, and it's certainly been a challenge and learning curve for me. It's in Elixir, so I just seemingly annoy everyone by putting typespecs on everything. Haha. Even if Dialyzer isn't ran, it still provides some documentation on what's going on where. My personal opinion is that there aren't any huge barriers to making static and dynamic types meet more in the middle. There's the gradual typing approach like that in Racket and Typed Racket, but I feel that most of the times dynamic languages are really just dealing with fairly simple anonymous unions. Like a function make take a string or float and return some data structure or a boolean value.
  • baq 5y ago
    yup. fortunately, static typing support in python has made significant progress on both tooling and language fronts in the past few years.
• fulafel 5y ago
  Successful programs tend to attract reimplementations, and those are probably written by different kinds of people than the originals.
  • lispm 5y ago
    People even completely rewrite older Java programs into newer Java programs, changing large parts of the technology stack...