Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)
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?”<p>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&#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.<p>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.