| > 1. They get paid to do it. Historically, someone has realized that Java development was easier/faster/more stable than Lisp development. http://paulgraham.com/avg.html > 2. Java has hella libraries. I mean hella. You can find a library for almost anything. Lisp...not so much. http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/releases.html And that's just Quicklisp. To say Lisp doesn't have libraries for almost anything is pure ignorance. > 3. Java is a language for doing things. Lisp is not a language for doing things. I'll change my mind when I see a 2m+ line codebase that's been in production for ten years. Emacs has been in "production" since at least 1985, and is 650,000 lines of elisp and 318,000 lines of C (as of version 21.4, according to `wc`). The vast majority of its functionality is written in elisp, and Emacs is arguably more powerful than any editor or IDE written in Java. It's also more stable, easier to maintain, and new functionality can be added with only a handful of lines of code. To be blunt, it does more in 600k lines than any 2m+ Java project ever will. |
2) "A library for almost anything" (and lot of them abandoned or half done) != multiple libraries for everything and then some.
3) I wouldn't put forward elisp as an example of a good functional language. Actually it's crap. And Emacs is not more powerful that Eclipse or IntelliJ, except if you mean "has lots of hohum plugins and ome good ones".