[badsavage]

HN creator Paul Graham was really into Lisp. HN has been built with his own Lisp, Arc. HN attracted many experienced programmers and experienced programmers usually like Lisp, because Lisp dialects are simple, elegant and powerful.

[madiathomas]

I understand the PG part but I don't agree with the experienced Programmers part. I know hundreds of experienced Programmers and zero of them are using LISP. I am one of them. They are using C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python etc. Anything but LISP.

I won't even be surprised if LISP has a market share of less than 0.01%. Even in the US. Do you have examples of popular system built using LISP?

[reikonomusha]

Rigetti is a company that builds quantum computers and uses Lisp.

* https://github.com/rigetti

Google Flights is built on Lisp as well.

* https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/87540/google-flig...

I don’t think the parent meant that experienced programmers are heavy users of Lisp, or that they use it as their main language, but rather they often know it and have an interest in it, even if it’s not paying their bills.

[madiathomas]

Out of those 100s of Developers that I know, none is interested in learning LISP. Not even as a hobby. Experienced Developers have already chosen their tools and they focus on improving on those skills.

[reikonomusha]

I’m interested in why you asked 100s of developers if they’re interested in Lisp.

In my experience, which is evidently quite different to yours, excellent developers also want to increase their breadth, understand which tools are good for which jobs, and generally increase their knowledge about programming and software engineering. It’s usually the poorer engineers, experienced or not, that stick to just a few tools with no knowledge of others.

[madiathomas]

They talk about what they are interested in on a daily basis. You don't even need to ask them. They will tell you.

There are millions of development tools in this world. No-one has time to learn all the tools. Even if they want to. I don't understand why LISP have to be the only exception when coming to tools a Developer can ignore. I doubt Linus Torvalds has time to learn every obscure technology out there. He focuses on delivering kick-ass solutions using C. Same as other great Programmers. It is the book writers and consultants who are busy learning each and every tool.

[lispm]

A bunch of programming language developers learned Lisp and were influenced by it: James Gosling (Java), Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby), Brendan Eich (JavaScript), Alan Kay (Smalltalk), Robin Milner (ML), ...

Hardly 'book writers and consultants'. These are among the most influential people for programmers... if you had learned Lisp decades ago, you would have learned much of the basics for those newer languages: managed runtimes, evaluation, automatic memory management, programming with first class functions, virtual byte code machines, etc etc...