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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Then we should relegate LISP to an academic programming language and stop pretending that it is a major player when all the data proves the contrary. LISP failed for half a century because it isn't the best tool for the job, not because we are just stupid and only the select few have the brains for it. It is not the case. It is just not good for the job at hand -> delivering solutions.
I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP. I didn't see any resemblence of LISP on any of them. To correct you, Java was heavily influenced by C/C++, not LISP. In such a way that my transition fron C++ to Java only took me few hours.
"Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material." - Alan Kay
> Then we should relegate LISP to an academic programming language and stop pretending that it is a major player when all the data proves the contrary. LISP failed for half a century because it isn't the best tool for the job, not because we are just stupid and only the select few have the brains for it. It is not the case. It is just not good for the job at hand -> delivering solutions.
Nobody claims that it is a major player. My claim was that it was influential - not academic, but actually practically. People like Matz (Ruby) literally learned how to implement a programming language runtime by studying Lisp, in this case the Emacs Lisp runtime.
> I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP.
Nobody said it's required. It's just that when you knew Lisp, you would have already known about garbage collection, first class functions, virtual byte code machines, managed memory, etc. Nothing which is directly in C++.
> I have used 80% of those programming languages you listed in a professional environment and I didn't require to learn LISP. I didn't see any resemblence of LISP on any of them. To correct you, Java was heavily influenced by C/C++, not LISP. In such a way that my transition fron C++ to Java only took me few hours.
If you don't know Lisp, how would you know which influence it had on Java? C/C++ had directly no Garbage Collection, no managed memory, no runtime code loading (-> Java class loader), ... thus these things about the Java runtime were not coming from C/C++. You got the curly braces from C/C++.
Guy Steele, who co-wrote the Java language spec: 'We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.'