The problem is that the type of developer you're talking about is the kind who invents a thousand excuses about anything. It doesn't begin and end with different languages. Using a different subset of their favorite language? A different toolchain? A radically different build process? You'll hear plenty of whining about it. Even just moving them to a different codebase will make them miserable. You put a Lisp or a Prolog in front of them, and their attention flows upwards to the most general principles to whine about. The entire thing is that if you stick them into an unfamiliar environment, they will vocalize their discomfort through rationalization. I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Not that these people are necessarily bad at their jobs, but they're definitely a personality type you should learn to identify so you can manage them properly.

I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a Lisp-based project, there would be project standards (like no exported macros without signoff, and a list of standard library dependencies), documentation requirements, and code review.

The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn't mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.

One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio's Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.

I was fortunate enough to use lisp professionally for nearly 20 years. The only reason that gig ended was the unfortunate demise of the majority owner and founder, and his heirs selling the shop to a competitor that only wanted the customer database imported. Lisp was never the problem, nor particularily messy.

On the contrary, we considered it a major reason we were able to build a quite successful stock broker and bank from scratch with a team of 4-6 people, who doubled as datacenter ops (we ran on-prem), internal tech support for the rest of the firm (~20 people) and 2.line customer support.

We quite naturally converged on a set of internal libraries for various tasks. Understanding and fixing each other’s code was not a big deal.

Coincidentally, our frontend was php. That was messier, and we conciously kept that layer as lean as possible.

I use Common Lisp at work.

>> said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work.

Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work.

edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!

> The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.

Have you like looked at anything in the Clojure ecosystem because this description makes no sense of any kind. Clojure has macros but less powerful than common lisp and Clojure code in the ecosystem tends to be small and understandable.

I have a complete and utterly opposite experience. I have used and shipped all sorts of solutions in dozens of different languages before getting to know Lisp. My only regret is that I have not tried learning Lisp sooner - it feels like such a walloping waste of my life.

Lisp dialects turned out to be extremely practical - I just can't even imagine doing the things I do today with Emacs in anything else. Achieving similar effects with any other tool would be enormously more time consuming and far more frustrating. Sure, it really took me years to get to that point, but even though I had already knew all sorts of other tools which I could've picked to achieve similar results - from bash/zsh, awk, sed and tcl to python, golang and a bunch of others, the way Lisp-driven Emacs lets me get there is beyond meaningful comparison. Nothing even comes close and I'm enormously proficient in vim, I spent almost a decade in IntelliJ and used tons of different IDEs before - from Delphi and Eclipse to Visual Studio and VSCode.

Clojure, at which I scoffed at some point, turned out to be an immensely pragmatic tool for dealing with data. Any kind of data - big or small. It effectively replaced jq in my toolbelt, all my API interrogations happen in a Clojure REPL today. Fetching data from psql, mysql, sqlite and sorting, slicing, dicing, transforming that data interactively, directly from my editor is an absolute delight.

Building simple web-scraping scripts with nbb driving Playwright is so much faster than using any other stack, even javascript is no longer "an obvious choice" for me, even though I spent decades learning its quirks.

Babashka has replaced any kind of bash-scripting - anything longer than three lines almost has no reason to be made in bash/zsh/fish anymore.

Anything Lua-driven is now done with Fennel. It's not even funny how a dozen-lines boilerplate of Lua can be compacted into a simple, reasonable three-liner Fennel macro. Or the way how I can connect to the Hammerspoon REPL and poke through visual elements of any app on Mac, interactively and with ease - is complete and total bananas.

Era of LLMs incidentally highlighted another enormous advantage of Lisp - when you give an LLM a true Lisp REPL, agents stop guessing and start empirically analyzing current state of things and produces working solution faster, costing far less tokens. And you get to watch it solve things interactively, e.g. I often let AI poke through our UI (via Playwright-driven Clojurescript REPL), while monitoring situation in k8s - through nrepl port, connected to Clojure REPL. It literally interactively walks the DOM, finds the selectors, clicks buttons, etc. All without restarts, complex state management and all.

"Well", you may say: "these examples exactly what I'd consider a 'hobby language' territory".

Alas, I have worked in teams where Clojure was used for shipping commercial software and I have seen truly complex projects - Cisco's infosec infrastructure and FindingCircle's complex Kafka topologies. I have met and talked to people working at Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Nubank, CircleCI, etc., and I can confidently say: your self-conviction is absolutely backwards.

Lisp-world has never been more cornucopian than today; we see the proliferation of different tools and new Lisp dialects popping almost every passing week - Jank, Jolt, ClojureDart, Squint, Coalton, Clojerl, LFE, uLisp, etc. It is frankly inconceivable to find today any platform where you can't really run a Lisp. My advice to any programmer who's aspired to become a hacker - do learn Lisp. It comes in handy. For real.