I just came across an excellent Medium article by Kenichi Sasagawa that addresses the question of Why Isn’t Lisp Used More In Production that I wrote about the other day. My post took the somewhat cynical view that Lisp lost the language wars for the same reasons that Betamax lost out to the technically inferior VHS.
Sasagawa has a different view. He considers Lisp an “intellectual toy” in the good sense of bringing joy and fun to its users. Languages like Python, he says, bring to mind drudgery more than fun. Still, Python is very popular because it makes it easy to generate a lot of code easily. The batteries, as they say, are included.
I agree with Sasagawa completely about how much fun it is to use Lisp and I agree that it brings me a joy and pleasure that other languages don’t. What I don’t agree with is his implication that these other languages are more efficient than Lisp in the sense that it’s easier to generate code. My experience has been just the opposite: it’s easier for me to generate code with Lisp than it is with other languages.
Sasagawa’s article also speaks to another of my recent posts, Marlinspike On What’s Wrong With Software Development. Marlinspike claims that current development processes—largely imposed from above—have robbed all the joy from software development.
If you care about Lisp and software development, take a look at Sasagawa’s article. It’s short and a very interesting read.