From https://tudorblog.com/2012/06/16/voyage-of-the-scurvy/ :
> from about 1500 to 1800 two million sailors are estimated to have died from scurvy on expeditions to Asia, Africa and the New World.
> Why no cure? In Tudor England an effective treatment, scurvy grass (a corruption of cress), was commonly recommended; at the same time the Portuguese knew a cure, and so did the Spanish and the Dutch. For unknown reasons such wisdom was applied inconsistently (even by Britain’s Royal Navy after the Napoleonic Wars) until the identification of vitamin C in the 20th century.
It looks more like a case of the people making the decisions being unfortunately disconnected from the people who knew what scurvy was and how to deal with it. (And wilfully ignoring those who tried to point it out to them.)
1. That was before the scientific age. They didn't know about vitamin C at the time, they couldn't even see it, even if they'd somehow believe in it.
2. There is no scientific proof, 0, none, that Lisp is superior. And it's almost impossible to prove it, since it requires controlled studies at a large scale - good luck with taking away hundreds of productive programmers for that study :) All we have is hearsay and personal opinions.
Be careful; my quote has nothing to do with the confusion between lemons and limes that occurred hundreds of years later. The Navy instituted a lime juice ration in 1799. They switched out lemons ("limes") for what we would call limes in 1865, setting themselves up for the reintroduction of scurvy. But James Lancaster performed his experiment (and reported his result of 100% scurvy prevention to Naval authorities) in 1601.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28040748
-- US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health
"Clasp: Common Lisp using LLVM and C++ for Designing Molecules"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rSMt1pAlbE
-- GoogleTechTalks
Think of studies where you:
a) have statistically representative sample size (100+ developers)
b) actual numbers and compare them (the average development time needed for the Java/C++/etc. applications was Y and the average development time needed for Lisp applications was Y - Z, where Z > 0, etc.; the average execution time for Java/C++/etc. applications, etc., you get the idea)
Computer Science studies are still in their infancy.
All this Lisp hype is just hype and gut feelings.
It can take more than you might expect to "convince".
> In 1601, an English sea captain did a controlled experiment to test whether lemon juice could prevent scurvy. He had four ships, three control and one experimental. The experimental group got three teaspoons of lemon juice a day while the control group received none. No one in the experimental group developed scurvy while 110 out of 278 in the control group died of scurvy. Nevertheless, citrus juice was not fully adopted to prevent scurvy until 1865.
( https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/03/25/innovation-ii/ )