Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tharne 1541 days ago
> If Lisp is do efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it?

Same reason most of us use QWERTY keyboards instead of one the many better layouts available. After a long enough time as the dominant tool, things get locked in regardless of whether or not they're the best tool for the job. C-Style languages gained dominance early on and became the defacto standard.
1 comments
Syzygies 1541 days ago
> Same reason most of us use QWERTY keyboards instead of one the many better layouts available.

Many people here are coders, not writers, and the layout for generating human language is irrelevant. With QMK firmware tap-hold, and one finger each hand chording, one opens up a quadratic expansion of expressibility, all near home row. Now one can automate all frequent actions (VSCode commands, application launches, windowing scripts) as paired keystrokes.

Keyboard layouts should be the poster child for "Don't get sucked into taking the problem statement as given, THAT's usually what needs questioning."

link
tharne 1541 days ago
> With QMK firmware tap-hold, and one finger each hand chording, one opens up a quadratic expansion of expressibility, all near home row.

I'm a happy qmk enthusiast. My point was that the overwhelming majority of people will stick with the defaults for most things, which is why usage and adoption rates are not always a good indicator of the quality or utility of a tool.

link