| > 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. About the ideas, yes, helped by being such an early language that it can lay claim to being the originator of a great many things. About the syntax, rather fewer. > Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects There are a great many success stories and just as many failure stories. 60+ years on, Lisp continues to exist but remains niche. > rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted. Yes and no; the pendulum swings but the oscillations get smaller. At this point the programming world has pretty much converged on present-but-lightweight typing with inference and optional annotations, for example; there are no new serious pure dynamic languages being made, and all major dynamic languages are putting huge effort into retrofitting typing. Long edit-deploy-test cycles aren't coming back but nor is live-editing your production system. > What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance? That's quite a different thing from saying that it's pleasant or even good. Every serious critic acknowledges that e.g. David Foster Wallace was influential and important, but many openly hate actually reading his work. > actual, pragmatic, lived experience Hardly. You've built this a whole edifice of beliefs that wouldn't withstand 5 minutes outside the Lisp bubble. |