[execat]

Paul Graham (Y Combinator co-founder) has a lot of essays on Lisp or mentions of Lisp:

* Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html * Beating the averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Other notable programmers have mentioned this. I can think of Yegge's article (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...) where he mentions this:

> ...It's dirty laundry that needs airing. The problem: Paul Graham. I mean, the guy's a genius, and I love reading his essays, and his startups are doing great things, etc. etc. You can't fault him. But he's created something of a problem. > Before Paul Graham, Lisp was dying. It really was, and let's not get all sentimental or anything; it's just common sense. A language is always either gaining or losing ground, and Lisp was losing ground all through the 1990s. Then PG came along with his "I'm not talking to you if you're over 26 years old" essays, each a giant slap in our collective face, and everyone sat up and paid attention to him in a hurry. And a TON of people started looking very seriously at Lisp.

In addition, HN itself is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

This is why you can't trust HN as the general opinion among people or even programmers. They are a very specific subset of programmers who are more likely to be interested in things like Lisp.

[dwringer]

> Paul Graham (Y Combinator co-founder) has a lot of essays on Lisp or mentions of Lisp

Nobody mentions them much here for some reason, but also the books ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp, at one time considered almost essential reading. I still think they're fantastic but they're not for instant gratification as they don't give you much in terms of immediate practical applications or real world system examples. Nevertheless they are among my favorite books on programming and I wouldn't be surprised if many people who come here similarly "cut their teeth" with those books.

[sph]

Because HN users tend to be interested in niche but powerful languages, they are not to be trusted to know programming in general?

Weird argument to close an otherwise excellent comment. I'd rather listen to the opinion of someone that also knows niche things, than one that only knows the mainstream and nothing else.

Also which group is more likely to create beautiful products such as a portable Lisp machine?

[veddox]

> Because HN users tend to be interested in niche but powerful languages, they are not to be trusted to know programming in general?

No, the parent comment meant that HN users are not a representative cross-section of programmers in general. This manifests itself, for example, in relatively niche languages being mentioned and discussed disproportionately often.

In other words: just because HN loves it doesn't mean everybody else knows it.

[elzbardico]

This is similar to the love HN has for autonomous driving. Most people outside here mostly despise the idea. So HN is not representative of society in general, But this doesn't mean the HN crowd is wrong.