Comment by fredrikholm

> Programmers with shallow understanding and lacking experience of Lisp (or straight bias against it) are missing out so much, it really is sad.

Most people I know of that tried Lisp and didn't like it did so by writing Lisp without structural editing, into a text file, starting a REPL, loading the entire file into the REPL and calling the main function from the REPL.

It's difficult to explain just how absurdly slow and cumbersome that is, as its the primary way developers work in other languages to the point that what you're saying sounds like hyperbole.

For those that haven't experienced that difference:

Structural editing when you have a homoiconic language that only has expressions is like combining expert level vim skills with vim macros and expert level IDE snippets/refactor shortcuts but with a fraction of the expertise as the tooling is simply less complicated.

REPL driven development is state retaining hot reload as a first class citizen, which makes regular compile cycles and the shenanigans you need to do to isolate your current code and make it run (eg. flags, rewriting main, writing tests) appear absurd in comparison.

By the time you add the features of Lisp systems on top (like condition restarts, runtime compilation, ASM inspection etc), most other languages feel like a big step back.