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Comment by SomeoneFromCA | Hacker News Reader

What kind of "freedom", precisely, are you talking about? Freedom to write purely functional programs? Well, then you need Haskell or Clojure at least. Freedom to write small, self sufficient binaries? Well you need C or C++ then. CL is a regular multiparadigm language with a rich macro system, relatively good performance but nonexistent dependency management, too unorthodox OOP, with no obvious benefits compared to more modern counterparts, and a single usable implementation (SBCL). If I want s-expressions based language I can always choose Scheme or Clojure, if I need modern flexible multiparadigm language I'd use Scala

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All of them. You can do imperative, functional, and oop programming in lisp. As for small libraries, it’s because cruft is an actual hindance in lisp. It’s like unix tools, you can do a lot of stuff with them, but a more integrated tool that do one thing better will fare worse in others. A big library brings a rigid way of thinking to lisp flexible model. Dependency management? Think of it like the browser runtime, where you can bring the inspector up and do stuff to the pages. It’s a different devloment models where you patch a live system. And with the smaller dependency model, you may as well vendor the libraries if you want reproductibility. Unorthodox OOP? CLOS is the best oop model out there.

The thing is that Common Lisp has most of what current programming languages are trying to implement. But it does require learning proper programming and being a good engineer.

You should probably reread what I wrote, and lay off your patronizing attitutde. "It is just better, you do not get it" won't work here. Yes you can do functional in Lisp, as you can do it in even in C, but why? The support for functional style is laughable, compared to Haskell or even Clojure. CL advocates are fanatically fail to accept bitter truth: CL is dead language with once great set of features which now present in many many other languages.

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