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by zephen 13 days ago
> For me, the answer to this is economics. Even if you love lisp, there are way more companies hiring for stacks that don’t include lisp

Certainly. But why would that be? It couldn't possibly be that the programmers already there built a system using the tools of their choice, and that system is now running well and deemed maintainable enough they require additional developers for the same language, could it?

Sometimes, of course, companies change their implementation language. The most famous cases I know of this are Viaweb and reddit, where the companies moved away from lisp. The company's main motive in this, of course, is making money. If they have a good product that is deemed maintainable, why would they piss off the original team, who probably chose the language, by switching languages?

Many programmers have worked in lisp. Studies have shown that programmers routinely learn new languages and somewhat forget old ones; older programmers are typically only currently proficient in as many languages as younger ones.

A company with a successful product is going to attempt to leverage that success. Whether leveraging it looks like incrementally improving it, or like treating it as a prototype and throw it out, will typically be a long conversation between developers and management. Typically incremental improvements are greatly preferred; it is only when all stakeholders become convinced that a fresh start is required that massive changes like implementation language will take place.

The calculus, of course is changing with LLMs. See, for example, the recent migration of bun away from zig. That rewrite was spearheaded by a massively effective lone developer, the exact persona that is claimed to always prefer lisp. Sadly, he chose rust.