Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)
As a former professional Smalltalk developer, I would caution against the experience of greybeards who wax lyrical about the incredible power of Lisp and Smalltalk, because even in their heyday that power was largely illusory.<p>Firstly, anybody who encountered these environments early in their career will always be misty eyed about them.<p>Secondly, ask them how big the team was they were working in and what the mechanism was they were using to deploy their programs.  Smalltalk in particular is particularly difficult to package up into a deployable program that somebody else can run, and collaborating on development is fraught with code sharing issues you just don&#x27;t get with less exciting environments like .NET or Python or Javascript&#x2F;Node.<p>In a modern context, Smalltalk and Lisp make little to no sense, especially when you have available a rich system of code being shared in more prosaic environments. It&#x27;s a modern miracle that you can build what you need without re-inventing the wheel.  There is no better time to be a programmer than now.<p>Lisp and Smalltalk may well be great for reinventing wheels, for writing un-readable self modifying code and as a challenging intellectual exercise, but all your productivity just went out the window.