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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

ITA's product backing the Orbitz system used Lisp heavily. They were just bought by google for a large sum of money. This isn't cherry picking, this is one of many real world examples you've never bothered to research.

Just because you don't pay attention to something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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Using anecdotes to prove a point is precisely what I mean by cherry picking. I know that Lisp projects can be successful, but is there some systematic way to show that they're in fact more successful? Google and others throw money around at a lot of non-Lisp shops too. Because it's possible to succeed with method B does not mean that there is a reason to switch if what I value is success.

If it makes programming more fun for you, great, but I think even that (if it's systematic for lots of different programmers) should impact the bottom line in some way that I could imagine measuring?

It just seems to me from casual observation that the success of Lisps is disproportionately low (not to be straw-manned into zero) compared to the enthusiasm and the exposure so many programmers have had to it through means like SICP at MIT. This is admittedly unscientific.

At this point you are simply being a troll. You are using a classic troll script, i.e. a variant of "You suck. Prove to me that you don't." Are you actually looking to get something out of this conversation?

I take a Devil's Advocate style sometimes where I make a case and then learn by someone shooting me down in a logical manner, and when that happens I change my mind. (And that is one of the great pleasures of life). I am being sincere here. I am confrontational but I do learn things from conversations quite frequently.

I think it isn't explored enough why Lisp, as such, (not to be straw-manned into the many brilliant and pioneering ideas that originated from it), has just not caught on very much. E.g. why does Google, with an army of PhDs, very consciously not let their top engineers use Lisps?

I postulate that, like Tim Sweeney's quote implies, that there really is a great cost (in terms of the problems that industrial programmers face) to the sort of extreme dynamicism that Lisps offer. Now some of the largest of those problems include what a company should do when their lead engineer quits in the middle of a project, managing extreme changing requirements, managing staff writing automated testing and creating documentation, and other things that may not be considered in pure academic study but where language choices and methodologies may make a large difference.

I think it isn't explored enough why Lisp, as such...has just not caught on ...

This has been the #1 troll on any lisp forum for 30 years. It has been explored ad nauseum. If you're being sincere (which I doubt) read Richard Gabriel

Looks like Google is using Lisp (a Scheme dialect, to be precise) as part of their Android App Inventor:

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

> but is there some systematic way to show that they're in fact more successful?

Please define "successful." If "success" is wide use, then you have defined your success in the most un-profound of manners.

> It just seems to me from casual observation that the success of Lisps is disproportionately low (not to be straw-manned into zero)

I'm not going to play this game with you. You've defined nonsensical metrics and then demand we play by them. Any specific examples I give (of which you could easily get for yourself with 5 minutes and a search engine) will be dismissed as "anecdotes" as you move your goalposts.

I do not care what you think, because I do not think you're interested in considering what I have to say. Let's enjoy our mutual indifference.

> Please define "successful."

"Profitable", compared to using another language. There are many objective ways this could be shown that wouldn't be vulnerable to being shot down by a non-falsifiability engine (i.e. any data I don't like is just an anecdote). For example, someone could attempt to sample startups at different time periods and look at financial growth over some timeframe.

Basically I'm looking for a metric that would show that pure functional language choices matter in a positive way. Any metric would fascinate me. Even success in contest problems of some type, when others had a chance to compete on equal footing would be something.

> There are many objective ways this could be shown that wouldn't be vulnerable to being shot down by a non-falsifiability engine (i.e. any data I don't like is just an anecdote). For example, someone could attempt to sample startups at different time periods and look at financial growth over some timeframe.

Can you show these for any other language? In a way that's not arbitrary and self-selecting.

> For example, someone could attempt to sample startups at different time periods and look at financial growth over some timeframe.

Thanks for the laugh.

> Can you show these for any other language? In a way that's not arbitrary and self-selecting.

I suspect you could have sampled Java web startups vs those still using C, Perl and CGI back during the time of Java's explosive growth and seen a systematic difference in profitability.

> Thanks for the laugh.

So any idea that there could be some statistical correlation between language choice and any kind of measured success is, on the face of it, absurd?

I suspect you could have sampled Java web startups vs those still using C, Perl and CGI back during the time of Java's explosive growth and seen a systematic difference in profitability.

Amazon.com has made a lot of money, hasn't it?

So any idea that there could be some statistical correlation between language choice and any kind of measured success is, on the face of it, absurd?

A relevant statistical correlation? Yes.

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