[daly]

For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough".

My claim is that Lisp is perfect for thinking about a new idea or a new approach.

For example, I implemented a program that merged Expert Systems and Knowledge Representation into a single system (KROPS) that allowed a domain expert to express their knowledge as rules or as facts. Anything the system learned by either method could be expressed in either representation. Thus, the two representations were "unified".

Another effort involved Human-Robot Cooperation to change a car tire (TIRES). The system could interact with the human through pseudo-natural language, learn rules dynamically, and expand its knowledge base of the current situation in real time. So the system self-modifies and learns through human interaction on the task.

Both of these systems required self-modifying code which is rather more difficult to do in other languages. In Lisp this is trivial.

As for commercial sales witness:

Axiom, a 1.2 million line Computer Algebra program written in Common Lisp, was sold commercially by the Numerical Algorithms Group.

YESOPS, an IBM Expert System program implemented in Common Lisp, was sold commercially.

[mbrodersen]

> For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough".

I am glad to hear that.

[mbrodersen]

It’s great that there is commercially successful software written in Lisp. However a lot more needs to be written in Lisp to compete with the hundreds of thousands of commercially successful applications written in other languages. I don’t think that will ever happen. But that’s fine of course. Pick the language that makes you happy and work with that. It doesn’t have to be a popular language to make you happy.