I'm a bit surprised that you're surprised by my argument given your awareness of a similar argument in history (which happened quite a few times). It is true t

I'm a bit surprised that you're surprised by my argument given your awareness of a similar argument in history (which happened quite a few times). It is true that the high-level languages "won out", and now even maybe scripting languages (Python is incredibly popular), but that also doesn't mean the concerns of the time were unwarranted. Many of those concerns did come true. Which, honestly, I don't think anyone was arguing that we couldn't continue moving forward with high level languages, but rather than we'll be able to write code faster but at the expense of hardware and that this can lead to enshitification. Though no one used that exact term. I'm not convinced most professional software isn't extremely resource inefficient and there isn't a lot of enshitification. > Paul Graham was moved to write "Beating the Averages" I mean look at the article This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It won't get you a job... but it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages you do want to use, like English. The reason learning Latin helps with English is because you start to learn underlying structures. It would still benefit your English skills even if people spoke it regularly. These are orthogonal properties. It benefited Graham because it was so powerful. But that power is getting you to think with lambda calculus. I know Lisp is a high level language, but there is more to all of this than such a simple reduction. I mean C and C++ are high level programming languages. Even Python was mentioned in that article! So if your takeaway from it was that high level languages are the winners then I think you've missed most of the story. Though I find his article starts to lose coherence as it moves into The Blub Paradox. There's no real definition of "power" and he weirdly is conflating it with how high level a language is. Which plenty of scripting languages like Python and Perl were available at that time. So if he's saying that Lisp was the most powerful, then it isn't about how "high" level the language is, which is the metaphor he moves into. It's so weird to hear his argument about the Blub programmer looking "up" the power continuum and thinking those languages are just as powerful. I think a lot of people think other languages are more powerful than the ones they usually write it (or even know). Hell, it is usually the driving feature to learn a language. The real reason no one writes in Lisp was already answered. No one understands it. And people will make compromises to ensure they can understand one another. This also is a self-reinforcing paradigm though...