[winestock]

I am the author of this essay and this is the umpteenth time that it has appeared in Hacker News. If you look it up using the Hacker News search function, it even invites readers to beat the dead horse one more time.

I'm surprised that it still gets so much attention. Every few months, someone volunteers to translate it into another language (see the bottom of the page).

I wrote that essay five years ago. Nowadays, just use Clojure or Racket and ignore what I've written.

And yes, I know, I really need to update the design of the site. I wrote it when I was still a rookie web developer. I'm starting a new job so I'll redesign my site in my copious free time.

[flavio81]

I think it's a nice article, no problem with it appearing for an umpteenth time again. Any article that speaks about Lisp is a good article for me!!

There are some pretty good points, however there are one or two things that i take issue to, because they can be misleading:

1. The "lone wolf Lisp hacker" is not the only kind of Lisp hacker. Lisp has been used on important codebases at space missions and there are codebases of million-lines Lisp code at work right now, for example for airline reservations.

There are some Lisp projects on GitHub being contributed to and forked. The amount is small because popularity of Lisp is small compared to the main languages GitHub users prefer (i.e. Java, JS, etc), but they do show there is collaboration between "lone wolves".

2. You write "Unless they pay thousands of dollars, Lisp hackers are still stuck with Emacs." I have used many IDEs (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, and many Borland products) and the combination of Emacs + SLIME is pretty good, to be honest.

[saghm]

Since you're here, what's your take on why Clojure has become so popular lately (compared to the mindshare that Common Lisp or Scheme seem to have nowadays)? Although I've barely touched Lisp (and never touched Clojure), it seems weird to me that Clojure is so widely used compared to other Lisps. From what I can tell, the main differences are that it's on the JVM (obviously) and that it uses loops rather than recursion, but neither of these really explain to me why things like ClojureScript exist instead of "SchemeScript" or something like that. Do you think it's related to the ideas presented in the blog post, or is there something I'm missing?

[winestock]

My take is that Clojure's community is distinct from that of other Lisp communities.

Old school Lispers are the Jacobites of the Computer Age. Their warnings were ignored, so their nightmares came true; and the world has changed so much, as a result, that few can even imagine an alternative. They were right about nearly everything, and now they are irrelevant.

So pour out a drink for the king over the water and for Genera. Curse this present dark age of bureaucrats and Posix. And then MOVE ON. The Clojurists are the first sizable community of Lispers that has done that.

[pmoriarty]

That was beautifully worded, and I would so love to read a post where you expand on what you said.

[lawpoop]

Why not put this disclaimer at the top of the essay?

[winestock]

Because then I'm reminded of all of the other things that have changed in the past five years. The essay needs a post-mortem, not a disclaimer.

Again, it's one of those things that I'll do in my copious free time.