Comment by epsylon
12 years ago
As much as I find lisp interesting, I've always hated the kind of smug comment like yours that every discussion on Lisp inevitably brings. Lisp is certainly far from perfect, and there are a ton of good technical reasons why people use other languages.
Consider it a response to the "lol you use lisp?!? that's really old right??" bullshit you heave to hear whenever you tell someone you use it. Nobody said lisp is perfect for everything. Just that it's better than most people are willing to give it credit for.
For instance, I'd use C for embedded systems, tight control of memory, or building libraries I wanted to be used everywhere. I'd use Erlang for distributed programming. I'd use Haskel if I needed pure functional programming. I'd use Java if I had a team of 500 engineers working on an enterprise app.
For any other general-purpose programming, I'd probably pick lisp.
> I'd use Java if I had a team of 500 engineers working on an enterprise app.
If possible, fire 490 of them, and switch to a saner language. Quintuple the salary of the remaining ten, and pocket the difference.
Sorry, but the director of product vision, who's my boss (as dictated by a complicated blame-shifting matrix of dynamic management) heard 12 years ago that Java is a good language for the kind of things he thinks we're probably building. He even gave us an incomplete UML spec to get started with!