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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

But you just touched on the reason programmers don't like Lisp: they prefer a language that has a lot of little bits of available functionality that they can mix and match, without having to do any real programming. Programming, as we knew it, is a dead art, modern developers only want to reuse some library that was created by someone else. Languages like Python and Java are bad to program, but ideal for this kind of lego-based development.

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> … are bad to program

And yet everything you run your software on (Linux/Windows/your browser etc.) is written in those languages. Mostly C/C++. So clearly millions of developers can do real work with those languages. And very little real world useful software (except a few websites and Emacs) is built with Lisp. Despite Lisp being an older language that most. And yes I know the standard reply to this is “all non-Lisp developers are stupid” which is just unbelievably childish/arrogant.

There have been several idiotic comments by lisp proponents in this thread and this is one of the stupidest. You appear to be criticizing all programmers that use libraries. You, and your peers, are coming off as arrogant and ignorant hobbyists, but the people you're talking to are largely professional programmers solving real world problems. Of course, one solves the problems that remain to be solved, and reuse good and proven solutions where these exist.

You are absolutely right. The arrogance of Lisp developers is just breathtaking. Especially because the very same developers have no evidence to support their claims. The world runs on C/C++/JavaScript. Not Lisp.

Yes, honestly, I love lisp, although my only claim to being a lisp programmer is that I'm the author of some emacs packages. But I have to admit that yes I've noticed a definite tendency for people in the emacs lisp community to be abrasive and difficult and not very friendly in open source work. I think perhaps more of them are in university-related jobs in europe and hence haven't experienced the wonderful fake friendliness of california tech companies.

Thanks for being honest about it. Lots of kudos! It is fine to be happy with a specific language. It is not fine (and very immature) to assume everybody else are idiots. Especially when those “idiots” have created all the software we use.

I don’t think Lisp is popular in European academia? Europe is very much hard core type theory. Just look at Coq, Idris, Haskell etc.

This is ridiculous! When you want to write a book or just take some notes, do you want to make your own paper all the time? Mix your own ink? I see the appeal to do this once or from time to time, but if I have to scribble something down, I'm glad these are ready-made for me. Guess I'm just a lego-based author.

This is not a good comparison at all. The better way to describe it is this: when you want to write a book, do you write paragraphs or you just write quotes from other authors? Writing your own text is similar to write your own code. On the other hand, pasting quotes from other people is not a good way to convey your ideas, but it is much quicker for those who don't want to write themselves.

No, it's a perfect comparison. If I do an art project, I might want to start from the very basics and want to do everything on my own. If I have work to do, a budget and a deadline, I use existing building blocks wherever possible.

I just imagine telling my boss I could do the job in a week in Python ... or I could use this amazing forgotten language that requires me to implement almost everything from scratch. But it will be totally worth it, some day, I swear!

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