Comment by bryanlarsen
5 days ago
Rust is "Jack of all trades, master of some".
There are real advantages to choosing a jack of all trades language for everything; for example it makes it easier for an engineer on one part of your project to help out on a different part of your project.
But it sounds like the OP didn't get any of the benefits of "jack of all trades", nor did he choose a field where Rust is "master of some".
Lisp is the master of all. Or it would be except "Parens? Eugh! Brotha, eugh!"
There are lots of places where Lisp is unsuitable. I wouldn't use it for real-time control, for instance. Works great for orchestrating real-time controls though.
Lisp lost because none the the Lisperati came down from on high and deigned to explain how to use it for tasks running on the 1980s microcomputers.
Lisp also lost because the 1980s Lisperati spent all their time explaining lists and recursion over and over instead of explaining hash tables, vectors, and iteration.
Somehow, Lisp lost out to pathetically slow BASIC interpreters and C compilers that you had to swap floppies continuously for hours. That is a stunning level of fail.
Given that most modern languages are an half implementation of Lisp, with exception of C derived languages, in GC, JIT, JIT caches, REPL, dynamic code loading, IDE tooling, and how this AI wave is driven by the language that Peter Norvig coined as being an acceptable Lisp in 2010, I would say it still suceeded.