Re:Lisp is Poetry and Most Programmers Want Prose (2006)
by cageface on Monday May 31, 2010 @04:39PM
(#1393433)
It is a false dichotomy.
Perhaps, but in practice communities centered around more esoteric languages seem to spend more time working on elegant hacks and self-referential tools than on producing working, useful products. I met a lot of very smart hackers when I was still seriously doing Common Lisp coding but none of them could show me anything actually useful they'd done with it, although they had a lot of very clever tricks up their sleeves.
For example, package management in Common Lisp was a mess. There were three or four completely incompatible systems in use and none of them were really polished enough to depend on. I was astonished at how quickly the Ruby community implemented and rallied around a single, simple, usable package manager, because I'd previously just assumed it was a hard problem to solve.
Perhaps, but in practice communities centered around more esoteric languages seem to spend more time working on elegant hacks and self-referential tools than on producing working, useful products. I met a lot of very smart hackers when I was still seriously doing Common Lisp coding but none of them could show me anything actually useful they'd done with it, although they had a lot of very clever tricks up their sleeves.
For example, package management in Common Lisp was a mess. There were three or four completely incompatible systems in use and none of them were really polished enough to depend on. I was astonished at how quickly the Ruby community implemented and rallied around a single, simple, usable package manager, because I'd previously just assumed it was a hard problem to solve.