Comment by efsavage
15 years ago
Alternatively, free market theory suggests that the reason there is no dialect of Lisp as popular as less expressive languages is that expressiveness is not a trait that increases fitness, or even might decrease it.
(for the record, I like Lisp)
That is true to a degree. I agree with what abstractbill says, that libraries are the dominant factor in most people's language choices (after familiarity of course).
Kawa Scheme makes it easy to call all the Java libraries, yet that hasn't made it huge yet.
FFIs just always seem to add some amount of friction. Stack traces, runtime error messages and documentation will all be referring to a language you're not using day-to-day, for example.
When you look at lisp code, all you have to go by are the names of functions. The code could do anything, and you won't find out what until you dig. By contrast, other languages have hints like types and standard, well-understood libraries and restrictions on what might happen.
This suggests lisp code is less approachable for second authors, precisely because of its expressiveness.