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I have a complete and utterly opposite experience. I have used and shipped all sorts of solutions in dozens of different languages before getting to know Lisp. My only regret is that I have not tried learning Lisp sooner - it feels like such a walloping waste of my life. Lisp dialects turned out to be extremely practical - I just can't even imagine doing the things I do today with Emacs in anything else. Achieving similar effects with any other tool would be enormously more time consuming and far more frustrating. Sure, it really took me years to get to that point, but even though I had already knew all sorts of other tools which I could've picked to achieve similar results - from bash/zsh, awk, sed and tcl to python, golang and a bunch of others, the way Lisp-driven Emacs lets me get there is beyond meaningful comparison. Nothing even comes close and I'm enormously proficient in vim, I spent almost a decade in IntelliJ and used tons of different IDEs before - from Delphi and Eclipse to Visual Studio and VSCode. Clojure, at which I scoffed at some point, turned out to be an immensely pragmatic tool for dealing with data. Any kind of data - big or small. It effectively replaced jq in my toolbelt, all my API interrogations happen in a Clojure REPL today. Fetching data from psql, mysql, sqlite and sorting, slicing, dicing, transforming that data interactively, directly from my editor is an absolute delight. Building simple web-scraping scripts with nbb driving Playwright is so much faster than using any other stack, even javascript is no longer "an obvious choice" for me, even though I spent decades learning its quirks. Babashka has replaced any kind of bash-scripting - anything longer than three lines almost has no reason to be made in bash/zsh/fish anymore. Anything Lua-driven is now done with Fennel. It's not even funny how a dozen-lines boilerplate of Lua can be compacted into a simple, reasonable three-liner Fennel macro. Or the way how I can connect to the Hammerspoon REPL and poke through visual elements of any app on Mac, interactively and with ease - is complete and total bananas. Era of LLMs incidentally highlighted another enormous advantage of Lisp - when you give an LLM a true Lisp REPL, agents stop guessing and start empirically analyzing current state of things and produces working solution faster, costing far less tokens. And you get to watch it solve things interactively, e.g. I often let AI poke through our UI (via Playwright-driven Clojurescript REPL), while monitoring situation in k8s - through nrepl port, connected to Clojure REPL. It literally interactively walks the DOM, finds the selectors, clicks buttons, etc. All without restarts, complex state management and all. "Well", you may say: "these examples exactly what I'd consider a 'hobby language' territory". Alas, I have worked in teams where Clojure was used for shipping commercial software and I have seen truly complex projects - Cisco's infosec infrastructure and FindingCircle's complex Kafka topologies. I have met and talked to people working at Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Nubank, CircleCI, etc., and I can confidently say: your self-conviction is absolutely backwards. Lisp-world has never been more cornucopian than today; we see the proliferation of different tools and new Lisp dialects popping almost every passing week - Jank, Jolt, ClojureDart, Squint, Coalton, Clojerl, LFE, uLisp, etc. It is frankly inconceivable to find today any platform where you can't really run a Lisp. My advice to any programmer who's aspired to become a hacker - do learn Lisp. It comes in handy. For real. |