"If you go this route, one day you'll realize you evolved the ultimate hacker language, and it became a godawful mess for writing real programs."
A Stradivarius (a kind of ultimate hacker tool) in the hand of a master can change people lives. A Stradivarius in the hand of a lesser musician will probably still sound pretty good. A master with a second hand violin can still move us. A busted up violin can't be made to sound good.
There's a lot of coders out there with second-hand violins. I wonder what they could do if they all had the Stradivarius. In real life there is physical scarcity, in the world of code the scarcity is a product only of our lack of curiosity and drive.
You'd think experienced engineers would know better than to say language A is categorically better than language B when the one thing real-world programming experience should teach you is that context is everything. Any engineering solution is a careful balance of tradeoffs and language design is no different.
In order to take this conversation in a more adult direction we should ask this: What the advantages and disadvantages of s-expr syntax, a jvm foundation and a pure functional core? What problems are made easier to solve by these features? What problems are made more difficult to solve by these features? What are the key tradeoffs vs the alternatives?
If you're one of those people that think FP is a silver bullet you're a missionary, not an engineer.
My question is not about art, but about who is using Lisps to make fantastic profit, against competitors trying to solve the same problem, in a way that would not be possible with more mainstream languages. If very few, it's not interesting in the industry. This is a shallow and narrow view but it also has the benefit of being observable and objective.
A Stradivarius (a kind of ultimate hacker tool) in the hand of a master can change people lives. A Stradivarius in the hand of a lesser musician will probably still sound pretty good. A master with a second hand violin can still move us. A busted up violin can't be made to sound good.
There's a lot of coders out there with second-hand violins. I wonder what they could do if they all had the Stradivarius. In real life there is physical scarcity, in the world of code the scarcity is a product only of our lack of curiosity and drive.