Re:Ask HN: Is Lisp the Linux of Languages?
by krschacht on Monday September 02, 2024 @06:01PM
(#41429135)
I should have said: desktop linux / Gnome. That would have been the clearer analogy.
But I don’t think it’s as simple as “who do you want to hire.” It’s not that hard to learn a new programming language. I have a hard time believing that if a small founding team picked lisp and got to product-fit, there wouldn’t be a fundamental barrier to them scaling the team.
Who do you want to hire?
For all of MacOS' brilliant strategy, the idea of an Xserve Sysadmin exists solely in fiction these days. Linux is comparatively a blowout success, and a lot of people know it as a result. According to StackOverflow's survey[0], Lisp's popularity among professional developers is lower than the interest in ObjectiveC. It's not the Linux of languages, because Linux is a fundamentally popular.
I don't work with Lisp because the code all blends into each other after a while, and I'm a full-blown Scheme apologist. But look - real-world problems demand real-world solutions, ones that you can reliably scale to 20 or 200 developers. Lisp is a pet language, and you have to live in a world that treats projects like cattle. The real question is mostly how far your personal dedication will go towards making it work.
[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...