<story><title>Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)</title><url>https://arnuldondata.medium.com/julia-and-the-reincarnation-of-lisp-f60cacd5822c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reikonomusha</author><text>Speaking impersonally, and not directly to OP, you can program in Common Lisp in industry, you just don’t want to &lt;i&gt;that badly&lt;/i&gt;, and then you justify why you can’t by making up reasons about not being able to hire, not being mainstream, not finding jobs, etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;Somehow, I’ve been able to keep stable employment as a programmer that writes Lisp for over a decade. I’ve written Lisp at startups. I’ve written Lisp at Facebook. No, I haven’t been a consultant on some weird legacy Lisp project either. The difference between me and someone who doesn’t have a career in Lisp is:&lt;p&gt;- I choose Lisp for projects that benefit from Lisp;&lt;p&gt;- I make the case to technical and non-technical people that I can solve their problem cheaply and efficiently, often with a concrete demo and without any of the vague promises of Lisp’s power;&lt;p&gt;- I put in extra effort to make sure we can hire for Lisp, train for Lisp, and integrate with Lisp.&lt;p&gt;If you want to write Lisp in industry, and if you’re a senior-or-greater engineer (whatever that means), then get some buy-in and write it. Learn the language backwards and forwards, and be responsible and accountable for your choice.&lt;p&gt;Unless you’re writing the world’s most boring software that needs 5,000 Java programmers all working on it at the same time, I can assure you, there is no issue with writing and maintaining Lisp, unless everybody you work with, including yourself, likes to pass the buck.</text></comment>
<story><title>Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)</title><url>https://arnuldondata.medium.com/julia-and-the-reincarnation-of-lisp-f60cacd5822c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>linguae</author><text>From the article: “My heart was broken because Common Lisp is such a fine fine language and it is a joy to work in and hardly anyone uses it in industry. The industry has a lot of code in Java even when it takes much less time to write code in Lisp. What happened to the programmer’s time is more important than the machine’s?”&lt;p&gt;I think one issue that Common Lisp and many other programming languages face is that while a programmer’s time is more valuable than a machine’s, there are dynamics at play when maintaining commercial software projects that favor coding in more popular languages, such as the ability to easily hire developers knowledgeable in the language and&amp;#x2F;or paradigm.  For example, imagine being a manager of a project written in Haskell that liberally uses functional programming concepts such as monads.  It’s easier to hire developers knowledgeable in standard procedural or object-oriented programming languages than it is to find developers knowledgeable in functional programming, and getting a non-FP programmer up to speed on functional programming requires training, which takes time and money.&lt;p&gt;I love languages like Common Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk.  However, if I’m working on a team project and my teammates don’t know these languages, then I choose a more common language like Python.  Programming is more than just expressing computation; it’s also about communication, and one major purpose of language is to communicate with others.</text></comment>