Skip to content

Comment on Ask HN: Why Shouldn’t I Use Lisp?

Comments

Assuming performance isn't a problem (which it may well not be), this does a good job of laying out all the other arguments against Lisp: http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

Basically: Lisp projects have trouble scaling to larger teams (and communities) because of how fluid it is. That said, for a solo project or a small team, no language has more expressive power.

That said, Jonathan Blow has the occasional good opinion and a lot of really bad ones. His anti-abstraction zealotry is the basis of most of the bad ones. As another commenter here said, there are no universal truths when choosing a technology; it's always about using the right tool for the job.

But: 99% of software projects are made by solo devs or small teams, and shooting for scalability in its many dimensions from the outset has doomed many a project from making it out of the door. (Or hobbled them enough that the "happy problem" of scaling is never encountered)

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.