stylewarning on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1d8jmuo/ask_hn_30y_after_on_lisp_paip_etc_is_lisp_still/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1d

stylewarning on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1d8jmuo/ask_hn_30y_after_on_lisp_paip_etc_is_lisp_still/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1d8jmuo/ask_hn_30y_af... --- [Disclaimer: Below is mostly unsubstantiated, unscientific, personal, and perhaps even somewhat incoherent opinion.] This might sound jaded, but the software industry and its incentives are far more perverse than they were 30, even 10 years ago. By and large, writing new, efficient, and/or interesting programs is not valued culturally among software engineers as a trade group. The number of software engineers "on the market" is at record highs, and the vast majority of them speedran any% a college degree or bootcamp and are looking for their entry-level six-figure Senior Software Engineer role straight away. The mere suggestion of taking a step back to look at language offerings, like Lisp and the paradigms it enables, is not helpful toward that pursuit. And even if someone does take that step back to take in what has been available for 7 decades, the average employer, too, won't care whatsoever. Lisp might provide a plethora of benefits, but the incentive structure of modern day industrial software engineering has all but eliminated the realization of those benefits in practice. Maybe there's some comparison to the coal/oil industry vs nuclear to be made. If you can go out in a limb and agree that nuclear is better in almost all ways, why do we continue to depend on and bolster the coal and oil industry? Why is the market for coal/oil bigger? Why do we keep hearing news articles about this and that nuclear plant getting shuttered? At this point, it's almost nothing to do with the actual intrinsic pros and cons of each energy source, but rather the culture, politics, and infrastructure in place to support each one. Lisp was born out of an idea that we can think about programs symbolically, and the Lisp of today carries that ethos in many ways. Even ignoring general debate about functional vs OO vs whatever, the idea that programs ought to first and foremost express ideas declaratively—and that we should have macros to let the programmer carry that torch into their domain of expertise—just hasn't caught on. In contrast, mechanical, line-by-line thinking still dominates every popular general purpose language (and I argue, will continue to). If your goal is to write a program that does something new and reliably, then Lisp is still ahead in my opinion. It's still, to me, the most efficient programmer's programming language (similar to how jazz might be called the musician's music) that is accessible and supported today. It's still an excellent choice for building many kinds of products. If you want a job in which you'll move slop around the internet superhighway, you will find one faster by writing Python.