4 ms·
As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall in
by coffeemug 3mo ago
As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall into a rabbit hole of hacking fun Lisp stuff and not actually getting any work done. Other languages have this problem, but Lisp I think more so.
The second flaw is that it eats perfectly capable minds for years and the results don't justify the time investment. Python or whatever is fine. I wish I took most (but not all) of the time I invested in Lisp and put it into something else instead.
- vkazanov 3mo agoHeh, i want to both disagree and agree. I started with pascal and then C++. And then discovered Emacs and Lisp. Boy, that was a revelation! Never ever in my life shipped a line of lisp code to production. My real life code was always Python or C++ or Java or C. All of my lisp was toys and emacs tweaks (50k loc in my config!). But most of production code is gone from my life. I am a mid-level engineering manager now. I mostly write texts, or messages, or emails, or slides... and still use emacs and lisps for fun and profit and competitive programming. Not a single production-grade lisp LOC in 20+ years. But, OTOH, i contributed to emacs, tinkered with compilers and interpreters and prog. lang. internals - all because Lisps made it interesting for me. And, in a way, this brought me closer than ever to the job of my dreams: i work for a major player in static analysis space. So yes, you are right and wrong at the same time.