| You've been repeatedly making a number of fallacious points here, which can be summarized as: 1. Lisp is a single language, with one fixed set of trade-offs, rather than a large family. 2. Lisp has been around for a long time, and isn't developed any more and has only historic significance. People who work with Lisp are essentially retro-computing hobbyists, not keeping up with what is going on. With regard to (1) Lisp is a fairly large family, and the members are different from each other. The strength and weaknesses of, say, Gauche Scheme are not the same as those of Armed Bear Common Lisp (to pick a random pair). There are Lisps that give you general purpose programming on Unix or Windows: multiple programming paradigms and access to the entire platform. Anything the system is capable of doing, you can do it through Lisp. With regard to (2), there are certainly some people who are into retro-computing in regard to Lisp. For instance, a few people have revived the historic Interlisp iplementation from the 1970. They have it running with its windowing system and all. There is an active trading market for old Lisp hardware like Lisp machines of various kinds. Sure. By and large though, people who are working with Lisp of any kind for real work are using something contemporary that is being developed. Just like people working with C (also an old language by now) are likely on a recent Clang or GCC, and not Borland Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS. Lisp people move on from old Lisp implementation, like they do from old C or Python implementations. You're dismissing the existence of new Lisp dialects, and of continuing development of existing older implementations. You're also dismissing the possibility that contemporary Lisp programmers might actually know Python, Go, C# and so on. Including ones who work on maintaining implementations. People who knows those other things and some kind of Lisp or two probably make better informed decision in regard to whether or not they use Lisp, that those who don't know any Lisp. |
However, despite the ongoing development and evolution of Lisp, it seems that its adoption in commercial settings may still be limited due to factors such as maintainability, developer availability, and the robustness of language ecosystems. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how these factors might be addressed to increase Lisp’s adoption in these environments.
I also agree that those who are knowledgeable in both Lisp and other programming languages likely make better-informed decisions regarding language choice. In your experience, how do these programmers navigate the choice between Lisp and more mainstream languages in different scenarios? I look forward to your insights.