The programmers who live in Flatland

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap.

It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.

The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

The reality of modern software development is that most people focus on languages they use for work, and developers are statistically likely to be employed at companies with large numbers of other developers.

The technical merits of languages just aren't relevant to choosing them for most developers, unless they're helping solve a people problem.

"Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations where a large portion of your time is spent reading code written by people you've never met who may not have known what they were doing.

Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale. Golang enforces uniform styles so that you don't have idiosyncratic teams doing their own things. Bazel is a largely language agnostic build system, with amazing build farm support. Apple and Google have both contributed heavily to sanitizers and standard library hardening in order to detect/eliminate issues without reading the code. Facebook has poured vast resources into automatic static analysis. AWS built an entire organization around treating all their internal interfaces the same as external ones.

> "Artisanal" languages like Lisp, and Forth can be fantastic at solving problems elegantly, but that's not the most important thing to optimize for in big organizations ... Many of the tools that come from big tech are designed to ease the challenges of organizational scale.

I think the field of programming languages has grown enough that we have to start acknowledging the future of programming largely won't be in the context of what it means for devs working at large corporations. One of my favorite talks is from Amy J. Ko called A Human View of Programming [1], which argues there are many other ways to look at programming than "tool for generating business activity" and "mathematical construct", which heretofore have been the dominant views of programming languages.

Because there are so many other forms and purposes programming languages can and will take (she goes through them in the talk), so evaluating them and creating them solely on how well they are able to fit into a corporate R&D pipeline is a very narrow and short-term view of the field.

Indeed, it's been the case for a long time now that most people who write programs are not in fact professional software developers. The most used language in the world is Excel, by several orders of magnitude, and it's the opposite of everything devs say a "proper" language must be. There's something we as a field still need to learn from that.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjkzAls5fsI