From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-10-05T22:43:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Confession: I never did ASM

Brian Adkins wrote:
> I can relate to the new language burnout; I wonder if I had learned
> Lisp years ago if I could have just stuck with it instead of learning
> a variety of languages that haven't seemed to surpass it yet. The
> fundamental nature of Lisp is attractive, but the syntactic sugar of
> Ruby sure makes it fun to code in. What an awesomely practical
> language.

The problem with Lisp (in its current form, not the elegant formalisms 
of the 1960s and of the core Scheme) is that it tries to be a 
general-purpose language when there is absolutely *no* market for paid 
Lisp programmers in applications outside of its "traditional" base of AI 
and symbolic calculations. Sure, you *can* write an efficient, scalable, 
etc., web application server in Common Lisp, but who's going to fund it? 
Sure, you *can* write a statistics package in Lisp, but who's going to 
buy it?

So if you had learned Lisp years ago (as I did) and been fortunate 
enough to network into a paid Lisp programming position (as I wasn't), 
yes, you could have just stuck with it. The last time I looked, there 
were still viable commercial Lisp-based enterprises, though I can't 
recall any names.