[badpenny]

lisp makes you an asshole programmer. you're encouraged and enabled to write your own language for each problem, thus isolating you in a world of your own views and ideas. it's a babelian tar pit, luring programmers to their doom.

being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers.

it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors.

anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic.

eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp asshole stage.

this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp.

it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts.

lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...

[TeMPOraL]

> a complete ignorance of social factors.

Maybe that's why I like Lisp so much. Because "social factors" are so frikkin' annoying and irrelevant and I feel the world would be so much better for everyone if we stopped paying so much attention to them as we do now.

[CamTin]

To formulate this a little more nicely, I might say instead that there is a real need for "intimate" languages, just as there is a need for "collaborative" languages.

As an example, the shells on my personal machines are often customized beyond the comprehension of anyone who isn't me, with tons of two-letter aliases and bash functions, cryptic environment variables, and a $PATH that's several terminal lines long, filled with labrythine symlinks and oneliners that I've accumulated over the years. Many people have similarly elaborate and impenetrable emacs configurations.

That's fine, since this is my personal environment, but at work (I'm a sysadmin, more or less) I'm still able to use more-or-less bash, and even write portable shell scripts that eschew bash-isms. Similarly, all that horrible e-lisp powering super-personalized workflows doesn't prevent someone from writing an emacs mode that they can share with others, the point being that a language that enables customization is great, because you can always just not do that and write code that others will find comprehensible.

Conversely, if your language forces you to write in a collaborative style, you can't gain efficiencies in your private use of it.

[TeMPOraL]

> To formulate this a little more nicely, I might say instead that there is a real need for "intimate" languages, just as there is a need for "collaborative" languages.

That's a... way of putting it I've never seen before. I'll remember the concept of "intimate" vs. "collaborative" language for the future.

Personally, even though I write a lot of Lisp and live inside Emacs, my environment seems to be quite... standard. The "collaborative" mindset is emphasized in pretty much every programming book out there, and I must have acquired this kind of weird fear of overcustomizing my environment thanks to it.

[silon3]

I'm not a lisp user, but I've used xml + xslt to generate xslt that processes xml to xhtml and I liked it ;)

[sklogic]

"own languages" are much more approachable for the others than the "own libraries". For very obvious reasons.