The programmers who live in Flatland

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.

Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.

Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.

But the real strength of Lisp is in the macros, the metaprogramming system. And I suspect that typing most macros properly would be a bit less trivial than even typing of complex generic types, like lenses. Not typing a macro, and only typechecking the macroexpansion would formally work, but, usability-wise, could be on par with C++ template error reporting.