> Yes, actually. If they wrote clearly enough so more people could understand their point, their writings would be more useful. The point of writing something i

> Yes, actually. If they wrote clearly enough so more people could understand their point, their writings would be more useful. The point of writing something is generally to communicate with others, unless it's a personal journal or diary, meant to be kept private. That's what Hegel and Heidegger did. They communicated with others. It's just that their thoughts are more complicated. > Isn't it much more likely that the difficulties are more due to the fact they are beginners, than due to the language used in the course? Did you teach identical material using other languages, and found the students understood the material better? (Honestly curious.) The experience is that 10% of a course were able to write some Lisp. 40% struggled with the tasks, but made it somehow. The rest more or less did not get more than the basics and were confused by things like 'code is data', recursion for iteration, ... > Meta-programming in Ruby has the same challenges Meta-programming in Ruby is very limited to what Lisp does enable. Matz designed Ruby for 'ordinary programmers' (his words). Ruby lacks the whole Code-is-Data idea and on the OOP side, it lacks many of the features of a MOP, ... But it was designed that way. http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2008/11/06/rubyconf-2008-matz-opening-keynote-notes/ http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2008/11/06/rubyconf-2008... Matz thinks that there is a cliff and Lisp is beyond that cliff for 'ordinary' programmers. 'Smart people just underestimate ordinarily of ordinary people'. http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/matzs-keynote.html http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/matzs-keynote.html > Instead, they put effort into persuading others the expressive power of Ruby is worth the tradeoff with predictability What Matz actually did, was scaling down the language to dynamic OOP + some functional elements. > I think the Common Lisp community certainly could have accomplished the same thing. The Lisp community could have scaled down the language. People have done it: Standard Lisp, Logo, Dylan, Eulisp, ISLisp, Scheme, Clojure, ... Some were more scaled down that others. Common Lisp stayed like it ever was: a language with lots of flexibility and extensibility. > There's nothing about the language itself hindering broader adoption, or limiting it's use to academics or elite programmers I've seen research programmers struggling debugging macros which were writing macros. There are code bases where I myself struggle debugging stuff... Common Lisp is great, but it offers so many ways to shoot yourself into the foot....