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The programmers who live in Flatland

(blog.redplanetlabs.com)
107 points winkywooster | 4 comments | 27 Nov 25 15:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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chromaton ◴[07 Dec 25 17:12 UTC] No.46183237[source]▶
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.
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1. tikhonj ◴[07 Dec 25 17:20 UTC] No.46183299[source]▶
> 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.

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2. scragz ◴[07 Dec 25 18:51 UTC] No.46184027[source]▶
free market brain.
3. samdoesnothing ◴[07 Dec 25 20:33 UTC] No.46184881[source]▶
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.
4. hu3 ◴[08 Dec 25 02:05 UTC] No.46187495[source]▶
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".