The programmers who live in Flatland

Lisp has been around for 65 years (not 50 as in the author believes), and is one of the very first high-level programming languages. If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. But it hasn't, and advocates like PG and this article author don't understand why or take any lessons from that.

> If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now.

That is a big assumption about the way popularity contests work.

The sketch here would be that Lisps used to be exceptionally resource-intensive, allowing closer-to-metal languages to proliferate and become the default. But nowadays even Common Lisp is a simple and lightweight language next to say Python or C++. Still it's hard to overcome the inertia of the past's massive investments in education in less abstraction-friendly languages.

You’re assuming that people choose languages based on merit and not based on how much money someone will give them for using them.

free market brain.

If something is marginally better, it's not guaranteed to win out because markets aren't perfectly rational. However if something is 10x better than its competitors it will almost always win.

I take Lisp more like artisanal work. It actually requires more skill and attention to use, but in good hands it can let someone really deliver a lot quickly.

That said, like in anything else, this kind of craftsmanship doesn't translate to monetization and scale the markets demands. What markets want is to lower barrier for entry, templatize, cheapen things, and so on.

It's normal then that languages optimized for the lowest common denominator, with less expressive power and more hand holding have won in popularity in enterprise and such, where making money is the goal, but that Lisp remains a strong and popular language for the enthousiasts looking to level up their craft or just geek out.

You're assuming something better on merit wouldn't make more money as a result, and I'm questioning the actual merits as a result

this assumes that greatness is a single dimension, and namely, popularity.

the silent assumption in both of your perspectives is that the current monetary system is an even playing field when it comes to this context (corporations and their programmers)

Invert the logic.

The big assumption here is to think that a language can be so much superior and yet mostly ignored after half of century of existence.

I'm sure Lisp has its technical merits but language adoption criterion is multi-dimensional.

Thinking Lisp should be more popular disregarding many factors of language popularity is the true "Programmer who live in Flatland".

And a C compiler transforms the code into something very lisp-like (SSA).