Lisping at JPL (2002)
I&#x27;ve read this story a couple times as it&#x27;s popped up on the internet in different places. I&#x27;ve enjoyed it each time because it promises that lisp is an uber-powerful and easy (?) language.<p>I&#x27;m always curious though: what&#x27;s the other side of the story? Why is lisp always rejected?<p>I started programming seriously (for money) in 2009, and when we needed a language we went with python because it had better math&#x2F;science libraries than Java and much more libraries in general than clojure&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;ocaml. I confess I like the functional languages and like using some of their features in python.<p>Was the no-libraries dealbreaker for the &quot;pure&quot; functional languages also true in 1999, which led google to java? Or maybe there are complex meta-programming bugs you can generate in the functional languages (and elsewhere) that are the dealbreaker? Or what?