I'm waiting for more than a few cherry-picked examples of people who talked their boss into letting them use it, and academic papers, to be interested. Clojure start-ups using it as a competitive advantage to make money competing against others trying to solve similar problems would be very very interesting. Some people seem to believe that its constructs for dealing with concurrency have such potential, but on the other hand I can't tell if any of this is real or cult-like hype. (Flame bait: look how excited people were about Haskell a couple of years ago, and to some extent still are.)
My suspicion is that it is as close to a proven fact as you get in technology that real-world business programmers don't want Lisp. Yet it creates unequaled excitement and enthusiasm, as it has for half a century. A whole generation of top programmers trained at places like MIT were trained in Lisp from the very beginning. It had a firm foothold in places like Nasa. Yet how many of these programmers now use Lisp in the industry? I don't think very many, especially relative to the amount of enthusiasm people have for it. Lack of education and exposure and trials has most emphatically not been the issue here. Do the lead engineers at Google let their employees use Lisp? No. Now do all of you know something they don't or is it the other way around? Was Paul Graham's genius (as a programmer who spent his formative years learning BASIC) to use Lisp or was he a brilliant person with an ingenious idea to build a customizable online store in the mid 1990s and could have succeeded in any language? It seems to me that Lisp is so old and has failed to maintain a real foothold in the industry for so long that these questions demand answers. Postulating that maybe there are companies using Lisp in secret doesn't cut it here.
As a side note, one of Paul Graham's famous essays has a bizarre pieces of logic that goes "If Lisp makes you a better programmer, why not use it all the time?" It does not follow. Swinging a weighted bat might make you a better hitter, a ballroom bar might make you a better dancer, training at high altitudes might improve your cardio.
I close with this interesting quote from Tim Sweeney:
"Of course, it's easy to see how this undercurrent arises. When you release a language, you receive complaints from users about all the things they want to do and can't, and the ultimate way to satisfy all of these requests is to expose all metadata: make it extensible, make objects dynamic, and allow the possibility of completely dynamic typing. The end of the road here looks an awful lot like LISP and SmallTalk.
"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."
My suspicion is that it is as close to a proven fact as you get in technology that real-world business programmers don't want Lisp. Yet it creates unequaled excitement and enthusiasm, as it has for half a century. A whole generation of top programmers trained at places like MIT were trained in Lisp from the very beginning. It had a firm foothold in places like Nasa. Yet how many of these programmers now use Lisp in the industry? I don't think very many, especially relative to the amount of enthusiasm people have for it. Lack of education and exposure and trials has most emphatically not been the issue here. Do the lead engineers at Google let their employees use Lisp? No. Now do all of you know something they don't or is it the other way around? Was Paul Graham's genius (as a programmer who spent his formative years learning BASIC) to use Lisp or was he a brilliant person with an ingenious idea to build a customizable online store in the mid 1990s and could have succeeded in any language? It seems to me that Lisp is so old and has failed to maintain a real foothold in the industry for so long that these questions demand answers. Postulating that maybe there are companies using Lisp in secret doesn't cut it here.
As a side note, one of Paul Graham's famous essays has a bizarre pieces of logic that goes "If Lisp makes you a better programmer, why not use it all the time?" It does not follow. Swinging a weighted bat might make you a better hitter, a ballroom bar might make you a better dancer, training at high altitudes might improve your cardio.
I close with this interesting quote from Tim Sweeney:
"Of course, it's easy to see how this undercurrent arises. When you release a language, you receive complaints from users about all the things they want to do and can't, and the ultimate way to satisfy all of these requests is to expose all metadata: make it extensible, make objects dynamic, and allow the possibility of completely dynamic typing. The end of the road here looks an awful lot like LISP and SmallTalk.
"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."