As far as I know, the hacker news site is written in some lisp, with lots of lisp fans here.
I'm with you though. Lisp can be great for some problems but it's mostly not. The lisp guys hate hearing that and shout you down.
One measure of a language is how well it works to pass on a source base to a new team of programmers. I bet if someone were to go measure lisp against C they would find at least a 100x greater success rate with the passing on of C.
The lisp guys are profoundly focussed on how easy it is for them to write code. The real world is more concerned with how easy it is to maintain, review, enhance code.
This seems like a strange accusation. It seems like the usual complaint is that lisp programmers are more concerned with elegance than getting anything accomplished.
Heh. As much as I agree with pretty much everything he says in that presentation the GP's point is pretty relevant here: Rich Hickey is far, far to the right on the programming bell curve. Things normal people will have real difficulty grasping are going to seem glaringly obvious to someone like that.
I'm with you though. Lisp can be great for some problems but it's mostly not. The lisp guys hate hearing that and shout you down.
One measure of a language is how well it works to pass on a source base to a new team of programmers. I bet if someone were to go measure lisp against C they would find at least a 100x greater success rate with the passing on of C.
The lisp guys are profoundly focussed on how easy it is for them to write code. The real world is more concerned with how easy it is to maintain, review, enhance code.