Lisp enthusiasts don’t get why Lisp isn’t popular. And they keep repeating the same thing over and over again: that somehow it isn’t Lisp that’s the problem but something else. Nope. The problem is Lisp. I have written my own Lisp interpreters just for fun. An it is nice how you can built a language from very little. However it still doesn’t make me want to use Lisp for real projects. The same way I admire Lambda calculus but would never use it for real programming.
So why isn’t the world full of brilliant software written in Lisp? Surely having a powerful language like that will make developers use it? And even if the non-Lisp enthusiasts don’t “get it” how come the Lisp enthusiasts isn’t blowing the rest of us away with awesome software? Honest question.
It is a good question and one with many nuances. There are large software applications out there written in Lisp and other "fringe" languages that intersect with everyday life but they are hidden away in various corporate infrastructures.
Software trends develop for many reasons, not all of them logical. The time for Lisp being used as a general programming language may have passed, or the right set of circumstances have not yet come together. It is very difficult to predict programming language winners. What seems obvious in retrospect was not clear at all at the moment.
I would like Lisp/Scheme/Racket to blow people away with awesome software. Questions raised about price are quite valid. Forcing people to use Emacs is not a path to greater Lisp adoption. There are those of us who have found career niches using Lisp, but there needs to a better effort both in education and tools.
Resurrecting old Lisp environments and dragging them into the present day probably isn't the best solution. Perhaps the best solution is a VSCode environment coupled with real-world examples. More Todo lists and CRUD editors as examples haven't done a lot of good in driving adoption.
Your questions might make some uncomfortable, but I like that you are asking them!
And if the answer is “nobody will hire a Lisp programmer” then surely all the Lisp lovers of the world could create a company and crush the competition with awesome software? If Lisp really is as powerful as they claim?
A lot of Lisp lovers have found comfortable and profitable niches to practice their trade and aren't interested in forming companies or consultancies to crush the competition. Some Lisp lovers survived the AI winter of the 80s and have flashbacks of scrambling to port their tools over to Java. Some Lisp lovers are academics and education, not commerce, is where they find meaning.
Your question motivates and challenges me. Some of the emerging and successful no-code platforms could have been written using Lisp. Maybe that is one possibility...
Now thats the kind of thinking the Lisp community needs more of to be more successful. Find real world projects where Lips has an advantage and show the advantage by actually doing it. Or promote stories showing how Lisp has been used for cool projects in the past. I know some satellites were running on Lisp. Making it possible to remote REPL the satellite to fix issues. Now that is cool and shows one of the unique features of Lips that developers actually care about.
Look I wish Lisp was better than the rest. Because having something, anything, better than what I have now would obviously be an improvement. However Lisp clearly empirically isn’t better. It has failed in the only game that counts: the real world of software development.
