Lisp: Show me the Beef.

This is the wendy's moment.

God do people like talking about lisp. How amazing and transcendent it is.

Now, I tried lisp. For one semester of Scheme in my programming languages class, unfortunately taught by a teacher who was unable to communicate to humans, and not because he was foreign.

I never went back. Don't even think about going back. Not even a little. Of course I bombed out of the Math department, and most lisp people are math people.

Still, lisp is beyond hype. It is the most mythical and legendary thing in computers, which is bizarre since usually the subject of such things has passed in antiquity. Lisp is right there. Go ahead, there's a dozen implementations. Even a JVM one. The legendary power, right there.

Here's the catch. And this applies to haskell too: WHERE ARE THE APPS? I've heard ludicrous stories of lisp hackers bragging 100x productivity over other languages.

Okay.

Where are the apps?

C begat the UNIX operating system, DOOM, databases, and many office suites. That is a serious software resume.

What has lisp given us? Emacs? Anything else? Anything?

Java doesn't have as amazing a resume as C does, but it does run huge numbers of web sites. Those are killer apps in their own right, transforming your life. How many sites are written in Lisp? That should be some low-hanging fruit. Nope, ruby beat you to that.

What is apparent after decades, let me repeat, _decades_ of existence, through the expansion of computing power by a factor of 1000, lisp has not delivered on its legend. Not even minimally.

Instead, what is apparent is that it is a cult language. This comparison is so appropriate, since the cult of lisp subdivides into even more subcults, even down to the individual. Between the non-infix notation, parentheses, macros, individually produced programming paradigms and features, one man's lisp code is unreadable by another.

If lisp was the most freedom in programming possible, then it used its freedom to shoot itself.

I'll grant the lispers this: if you write lisp, your IQ and ability are measurably above other programmers. And that is the problem with lisp. For every story about the lone lisper beating an entire competing programming department's output in some circumstance, I can't distinguish between the lone genius producing a lot of software in any language/ecosystem from the language/ecosystem itself.

Everyone knows that a single smart programmer can often beat the output of 5-10 average people having to write specs, communicate, have status meetings, status reports, agree on interfaces, deal with different communication vocabularies, and different abilities.

But it just doesn't scale. Lisp doesn't scale. Lisp programmers don't scale. Lisp programs don't scale.

And that's why the crowning achievement of Lisp is a text editor.