Hi all,
Time to delurk. I'm a Lisper and mathematician who has been reading
this group for about a year, but I haven't posted until now.
On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Jason Dusek
What can we say to that? I'm well practiced in handling those who reject types outright (Python programmers), those who reject what is too different (C programmers), those who can not live without objects (Java programmers), those who insist we must move everything to message passing (Erlang programmers). It's not too often that I meet an embittered LISP programmer -- one who's well acquainted with a bold and well-supported community of functional programmers whose shooting star soon descended to dig a smoking hole in the ground.
I think you rarely meet embittered Lisp programmers simply because we Lispers are rarely embittered, but are still Lisping happily, and don't feel that the picture of a "shooting start descending to dig a smoking hole in the ground" is an accurate representation of reality. :-)
Who's to say Haskell (and the more typeful languages in general) do not find themselves in the same situation in just a few years' time? Is avoiding success at all costs really enough?
That's funny, because from my perspective the situation looks diametrically opposite. Haskell is an awesome language, and I would love to use it, but the community seems so small, and I've never seen a Haskell job. Lisp, on the other hand, has a thriving community, several high-quality implementations for all major platforms, and pays my bills. My impression has always been that Haskell, unlike Lisp, is little more than a marginal research language which is only used in academia and by a few enthusiastic hobbyists. Am I just hanging around with the wrong people? I hope I am: I would love to have a Haskell job some day.