Comment by troad
12 days ago
Very much a personal anecdote, but I spent about a month earlier this year seriously learning various Lisps (CL, Racket Scheme, Clojure). I stopped when it clicked for me - Lisps are a mess. Everything I wanted from Lisp I found in Haskell.
I'm reasonably confident that all the anecdotes you hear about 10x improvements from switching to Lisp are just programmers learning about functional programming and good design patterns for the first time. But those aren't contingent on using a Lisp, and I'd argue using Lisp brings an enormous amount of cruft and baggage that makes FP seem far more alien and difficult than it needs to be.
The 10x seems to mostly have been from programmers switching from extremely low level languages like C++ to something far higher level. Paul Graham also talks about macros in his well known essay, but I honestly think a lot of the value one gets from Lisp can be found with Python. There are a lot of things you don't have to worry about like manual memory management and so on. Python isn't as fast as lisp or as beautiful (opinion), but the ecosystem is very impressive and the community isn't as fractured as the lisp community (for example see the bipolar lisp programmer essay).
I don't think FP by itself is that massive of a win despite what some dubious studies or zealots say, but it's certainly better than enterprise Java. I've read my fair share of horror stories of Haskell in production too.
> Paul Graham also talks about macros in his well known essay
With all due respect, he is ironically probably the biggest blub programmer.
How so?
Ultimately, programming languages are tools, and different tools are appropriate for different jobs.
There's nothing stopping you from writing a massively-scaling e-commerce site in Verilog and running it on an FPGA, but it - uh - probably isn't the soundest course of action.
Yep. I'd agree with that statement. Although there's a lot of tools I'd struggle to use practically anywhere.
I think the idea that Lisp was so much more productive than other languages originates from a much earlier time. But now the most important features of Lisp - like garbage collection - are commonly available in most languages.