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It might be that simply committing strongly to a language, any language, has benefits? Years ago, a long term consulting customer hired me on a short fire-drill

It might be that simply committing strongly to a language, any language, has benefits? Years ago, a long term consulting customer hired me on a short fire-drill job. He had also hired some Clojure celebrities like Stuart Sierra and Stuart Holloway. They were incredible productive and fast. It was a very long time ago, but as far a I remember they had a small set up libraries they used. BTW, I was hired for a few hours a week to help with dev ops, not code. EDIT: I am currently working (part time) with an all in Common Lisp company. It is really nice to see a group of people who all love a programming language using it. As much as I like virtually ALL Lisp languages, I do sometimes feel guilty not just using Python when there are much better libraries available (e.g., machine learning, linked data, etc.). When a programming language has 1000x as many developers you simply get a richer ecosystem.

didibus 4y ago
> When a programming language has 1000x as many developers you simply get a richer ecosystem Interesting comment given the article. That's the magic of Clojure being hosted, you get the rich Java ecosystem and get to use your Lisp that you love. The downside is you still need to deal with the rich ecosystem that isn't as nice as if there was a rich one in Clojure.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  You are correct, Clojure does get Java’s rich ecosystem, and Python’s via pythonlib. There is some impedance mismatch that you don’t get using, for example, Python directly. It will be interesting to see what languages win out long term. I really don’t like programming with Rust but it is becoming wildly popular. I do like Swift, the language is intuitive to me, has good REPL support, and has awesome standard libraries for machine learning and just about everything else. All that said, I am an old man, I like Lisp languages, and that works for me.
- cutler 4y ago
  He said 1000x developers not libraries. Big difference.

didibus 4y ago

> When a programming language has 1000x as many developers you simply get a richer ecosystem Interesting comment given the article. That's the magic of Clojure being hosted, you get the rich Java ecosystem and get to use your Lisp that you love. The downside is you still need to deal with the rich ecosystem that isn't as nice as if there was a rich one in Clojure.

mark_l_watson 4y ago
You are correct, Clojure does get Java’s rich ecosystem, and Python’s via pythonlib. There is some impedance mismatch that you don’t get using, for example, Python directly. It will be interesting to see what languages win out long term. I really don’t like programming with Rust but it is becoming wildly popular. I do like Swift, the language is intuitive to me, has good REPL support, and has awesome standard libraries for machine learning and just about everything else. All that said, I am an old man, I like Lisp languages, and that works for me.
cutler 4y ago
He said 1000x developers not libraries. Big difference.