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I don't think I've expressed myself well. When I say software at scale I mean: - going on GitHub opening a file and understanding what's happening - reviewin

I don't think I've expressed myself well. When I say software at scale I mean: - going on GitHub opening a file and understanding what's happening - reviewing a PR and figuring out stuff without requiring an ide - having easy onboarding with devs already accustomed to a base language and its patterns Java, C, TypeScript, Scala, Kotlin, etc. Pretty much all major languages offer this: less power but much less ambiguity and mental overhead. Lisps (with a minor exception for clojure) and Haskell are just not those languages. Which, again, is why all of those languages produced very little software worth of mentioning for decades.

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
And this is just not true: I’ve worked on large lisp programs in various situations with minimal documentation and done just fine.
- epolanski 3y ago
  That's not a strong argument. That's like saying world hunger does not exist because you had lasagna for dinner.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    How about the existence of major pieces of software written in Common Lisp? For example, American Express fraud detection was and maybe still is done by a CL program. Google Flights uses ITA Software’s CL flight search system. Emacs is widely used and contains a lot of lisp. I think basically no languages have failed or succeeded for technical reasons: generally, marketing and inertia explains the tech stack better than DX or theoretical superiority.
jimbokun 3y ago
Scala??? The language that never met an abstraction it didn’t immediately incorporate into itself?
fulafel 3y ago
There's a place for languages that are the COBOL of their niche, yes. Depending on how you look at it, they are DSLs too. Javascript in the browser is actually an interesting case here. (And after Javascript spralwed out... ClojureScript is the nicest way to write React apps)
tome 3y ago
That's interesting, because to hit all those points I'd prefer Haskell! I've never found another language where it's so easy to jump into an unfamiliar codebase, or to come back to code I wrote years ago and get started again immediately. By contrast, I don't think I could read idiomatic Java without requiring an IDE to help me navigate.
kazinator 3y ago
Of all things, did you just lob an accusation of ambiguity at Lisp?

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago

And this is just not true: I’ve worked on large lisp programs in various situations with minimal documentation and done just fine.

epolanski 3y ago
That's not a strong argument. That's like saying world hunger does not exist because you had lasagna for dinner.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  How about the existence of major pieces of software written in Common Lisp? For example, American Express fraud detection was and maybe still is done by a CL program. Google Flights uses ITA Software’s CL flight search system. Emacs is widely used and contains a lot of lisp. I think basically no languages have failed or succeeded for technical reasons: generally, marketing and inertia explains the tech stack better than DX or theoretical superiority.

jimbokun 3y ago

Scala??? The language that never met an abstraction it didn’t immediately incorporate into itself?

fulafel 3y ago

There's a place for languages that are the COBOL of their niche, yes. Depending on how you look at it, they are DSLs too. Javascript in the browser is actually an interesting case here. (And after Javascript spralwed out... ClojureScript is the nicest way to write React apps)

tome 3y ago

That's interesting, because to hit all those points I'd prefer Haskell! I've never found another language where it's so easy to jump into an unfamiliar codebase, or to come back to code I wrote years ago and get started again immediately. By contrast, I don't think I could read idiomatic Java without requiring an IDE to help me navigate.

kazinator 3y ago

Of all things, did you just lob an accusation of ambiguity at Lisp?