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> There's no point in trying to make other people stop talking about Lisp

Nobody is trying to make you stop talking about it. We’re trying to make you understand that the way you’re talking about it is elitist. When someone said they were confused by the syntax, you could have just explained it without judgement. Instead, you felt compelled to flaunt your membership of the in-group who understands Lisp, and try to make others feel stupid by implying that people who don’t understand it aren’t good programmers, or are anti-intellectual.

You’re doubling down on it in this comment, too, still insistent on making people feel like they’re “less than” because they don’t know Lisp:

> so other more knowledgeable and curious people

If I didn’t know Lisp, and my first exposure to it was from someone who sees this kind of toxicity as a reasonable way to speak to people, would I want to join their community?


> If I didn’t know Lisp, and my first exposure to it was from someone who sees this kind of toxicity as a reasonable way to speak to people, would I want to join their community?

Wouldn't (didn't!) faze me. Every community has it. The most popular languages, platforms and tools in fact bring out unbridled hostility. Probably, hostility finds a peak in the second most popular camps. :)

We have already lost people who are influenced by this sort of fluff, because those people will be turned away from Lisp by the anti-Lisp trolling about parentheses, niches and slow processing over everything being a list, and so on. There aren't enough Lisp people around to counter it.


Sorry to bust your minuscule lisp bubble but just because someone ignored your favorite niche language in an educated career choice, it doesn't mean they are ignorant.

Infantile language tribalism though, have no place in engineering and is blatant ignorance when coming from a supposed adult.


Lisp is a family of languages, most of which are suited for many purposes.

Implementations of Lisp are no more niche than other languages with managed run-times.

Lisp has been used for even operating system development: Lisp code taking interrupts, and driving ethernet cards and disks and so on.

Which member of the Lisp family are you talking about, and what do you think is the niche?


> Implementations of Lisp are no more niche than other languages with managed run-times."

No more niche than Java, C# .NET and Python? Right...

> Which member of the Lisp family are you talking about, and what do you think is the niche?

You can combine all of the Lisp family together and still it wouldn't scratch the popularity, demand or job positions of any of the top languages.

Look, nobody denies Lisp'like languages are being used. Just like Fortran. :)


So what you mean by niche is actually popularity, and not a specific application area?

Fortran has a niche: numeric computing in scientific areas. However, even Fortran is not your grandfather's Fortran 66 or 77 any more. I had a semester of the latter once, as part of an engineering curriculum before switching to CS.

It supposedly has OOP programming in it, and operator overloading and such.

I don't know modern Fortran, so I wouldn't want to look ignorant spreading decades-old misinformation about Fortran.


If it's about career choices, people skills and charisma will get you further than any technical decisions you might make.




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