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lisp makes you an rear end in a top hat programmer. you're encouraged and enabled to write your own language for each problem, thus isolating you in a world of your own views and ideas. it's a babelian tar pit, luring programmers to their doom.
being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers.
it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors.
anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic.
eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp rear end in a top hat stage.
this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp.
it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts.
lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros.
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