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A comment on Metabase: Why we picked Clojure. Parent comment

Re:Metabase: Why we picked Clojure by incepted on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @10:59PM (#10667676)
Even if your assumption about the trend being to higher levels of abstraction (which is highly questionable) is correct, this doesn't give any credence to the prediction that it will make Lisp finally popular. Yes, Lisp is a 4GL but even if everyone is rushing toward 4GL, there are plenty to choose from and it's not clear that they will flock toward Lisp.

Even if CS is still pretty recent (50+ years), there is still something to be said about a language that never managed to become mainstream in that period. Whether Lisp was ahead of its time is irrelevant. The question is: will there ever be a time where Lisp will be ripe for its time?

I think that window closed a while ago. It's not about the parentheses or its FP side, it's just that the world is moving toward statically typed languages with sophisticated type inference, and it's a league that Lisp simply doesn't belong to.

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Re:Metabase: Why we picked Clojure by j-pb on Thursday December 03, 2015 @04:28AM (#10668681)
> it's just that the world is moving toward statically typed languages with sophisticated type inference

The billion lines of Javascript, Python, Ruby and R would like to differ.

Each of the first three has probably more users than all languages (ML family, haskell, scala) with an advanced type system combined.

I love dependent typing, I truly do. But the right tool for the job, and a formally verified coq program is certainly suited for a rocket, but not for the high iteration and velocity environments most people program in.

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