[foobarian]

> In fact I conjecture that this is the reason Unix is more popular than Lisp -- because Lisps don't interoperate well. They haven't built up a big ecosystem of reusable code.

And why are there so many? IMO the language is too flexible for its own good. It promotes this curious intellectual solo-competition where you try to prove you are worth of the elite who get all the fancy FP stuff and make all this bespoke functionality.

It's almost impossible for Lisp to be popular. To be popular means a lot of people use it, but that means it can't be complicated much above the median. But because it lets individual programmers push intellectual boundaries it self-selects itself out of this pool. Any big collaborative project will attract this type of developer and soon the lesser developers (who don't dare object for fear of appearing dumb) are not able to contribute.

Just my opinion, if a little dramatic.

[zozbot234]

Haskell has its share of fancy FP stuff, and people manage to develop workable things in it. I still think Lisp really is too dynamic to be useful beyond a small scale of development.