| > Compare it to natural languages. Assuming any such comparison is valid is purely speculative. There are significant differences. > anyone who reaches fluency in a foreign language just "magically" stops hating it. Not true (plenty of people learn Mandarin and regret doing so), and even if it were true it could just be survivorship bias - of course people who hate a language are less likely to become fluent in it. > Turns out they don't really hate the language, do they? They don't hate phonology, morphology, syntax - they "hate" the culture, the idioms, the orthogonal stuff, right? No, sometimes people really do hate the language. > nobody in the right mind would ever join a discussion only to say "I hate Spanish, it's weird and hard to read". That might not be a productive thing to say in a discussion, but that doesn't mean it can't be true. > Like I dunno, how could anyone hate recursion, or closures, or pattern matching, or parametric polymorphism - these are just ideas, specific tools to use in specific context and situation. Plenty of people hate any or all of those things. I'd say it's reasonable to hate a tool that tends to have bad consequences - e.g. a language feature that makes code superficially easier to write but hard to refactor or debug. |
Oh come on. You're flummoxed about things that are not controversial. You don't have to listen to some rando HN commenter like me - there isn't a line-up of renowned CS figures or prominent programmers who ever harshly criticized Lisp to absolute rejection, even Dijkstra. People expect him to have bashed Lisp, but he actually praised it (and not once): "Lisp has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts." And there's a long line of well-known names from Alan Kay to Steele, Matz and Goetz, etc. who publicly said great things about the grand idea of Lisp. That is all well-documented and known. This isn't some "recorded history of the past", it's still going on - Clojure-like languages for different runtimes popping up every few months. Lisp isn't BASIC, Fortran or COBOL, yet some people waste so much energy to prove to themselves that it's somehow "wrong" or has "bad consequences", while Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects. All the while so many "opposing" ideas quietly died over the years - Ada's intended universal dominance; anti-GC dogma; Algol 68 complexity-heavy direction (though Algol's good ideas lived on); rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted.
What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance? I suppose an ignorant one. I get it, plenty of serious programmers acknowledge the influence and still rationally choose not to use it, but outright rejecting the idea because it doesn't "visually appeal to them" - that is some naivete.
Whatever. You free to hold any beliefs - my actual, pragmatic, lived experience says otherwise.