[brlewis]

I think you summarized his reasons correctly, but I see his reasons as faulty.

(1) assumes that if a technology is good, it will see steady adoption over time. This is not true. See "Why didn't the Romans have hot air ballons" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264998

About (2) I want to phrase my criticism carefully. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ron is a generally egotistical person, any more than your typical programmer, or than myself. What I am saying is that (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. It's akin to seeing someone take a better picture with a cheap camera than you take with your expensive one, and losing faith in expensive cameras. Or like listening to someone make a song sound better on an upright piano than you make it sound on a grand piano. The Python programmers who knocked him off his high horse at Google are not proof that Python is better.

[lisper]

> (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning.

To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.

[brlewis]

When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)

[lisper]

> you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought

No, What I concluded was that Lisp might not give other people as much leverage as I thought it would.

> Maybe those people are just really smart

You can't have it both ways. If they're really smart but nonetheless choosing not to use Lisp then there's probably a good reason.

[Xurinos]

Unfamiliarity? Discomfort? The choice could be emotional as opposed to intellectual. Smart people can spend a lot of time and effort defending the status quo.

[brlewis]

This deserves more discussion. I won't be able to do it justice today, but hope to restart the discussion later, maybe with a comment on your blog.

[lisper]

You might want to read this:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...

(Submitted to HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314572 -- but it died with a whimper.)

[brlewis]

Yes, that's where I would reply.

Unfortunately I'm not surprised it died. It's better thought out than the original Usenet posting, but less controversial.