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.

yes. and as a long time lisper, i don't think that it's the macros.

i think lisp's magic is a lot more cultural than most people think. i.e. how lispnicks implement lisps and the ecosystem around it. how easy it is to walk the entire ladder of abstractions from machine code to project specific DSL's. how pluggable its parsing pipeline is -- something that is not even exposed in most languages, let alone customizable.

the language, the foundation, of course matters. but i think to a lesser extent than what people think. (hence the trend of trying to hire lispnicks to hard, but non-lisp positions?)

and it's not even an obviously good culture... (just how abrasive common lispers are? need to have a thick skin if you ask a stupid question... or that grumpy, pervasive spirit of the lone wolf...?)

maybe it's just a peculiar filter that gets together peculiar people who think and write code in peculiar ways.

maybe it's not the macros, but the patterns in personality traits of the people who end up at lisp?