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.

I have several decades of programming experience and would never choose Lisp, unless for funny one pagers.

Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.

Sadly, much as I love Forth, it's kind of the same thing. It's an awesome language and it's a great way to bring up bare metal to a functional state, but who does that these days?

I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and everyone just uses Lua anyway, so Lua it is.

Which is a pity, because I like Forth, and I used to to create possibly the nerdiest project on Github. I like Forth a lot, and I'd encourage anyone curious about how you get from "chunk of thinking sand and copper" to "thing I can type commands in" to have a crack at it - it's easy enough to implement your own, just to see how it's done.

But I don't expect anyone else to jump up and like it too, just because I said it's cool.

Well, maybe one or two of you will?

The nerdiest project on github sounds like a high bar, what's the project?