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.

"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."

This is me to a T — even when I'm building hobby projects. The point of writing any code, for me, is most of all to see a certain idea to fruition, so I choose what will make me most productive getting where I want to go. And while I still worship at the altar of Common Lisp as an incredibly good language, the language matters much less than the libraries, ecosystem, and documentation for productivity (or even effective DSL style abstraction level!), so eventually I have had to make my peace with Python, TypeScript, and Rust.

Tacking on, part of seeing it to fruition, and continued lifetime, is to ensure you can communicate the intent and operation to a large group of potential successors and co-workers.

An incredible epiphany that you can't transmit may not be as useful as a a moderately clever idea you can.