The Lisp Curse

The Lisp Curse is all the people writing opinionated articles about the Lisp inferiority complex, instead of contributing to existing Lisp software. There are tons of incompatible, undocumented libraries for Perl, Python and C. This is no correlation to anything. The people who want to use existing libraries use them. Those who want to reinvent the wheel will do that and there is nothing you can do to stop them. Lisp Machines aren't magic. If you think GNU Emacs is…

I used to read these kinds of articles with interest, back in my Common Lisp programming days. They would worry me. Back in the day, I would even sometimes participate in language advocacy discussions. These days, I don't care at all — I just write great apps that work (fast). Some code runs on the JVM, some code runs in the browser, some runs in both places. I get to use an impressive set of libraries from at least three…

Will it be too much to ask that the lispers build cool shit, and then brag about how lips made it easy? That would be more pleasant compared to this chest thumping. The traits associated with lispers(lone wolves, nih syndrome, not interested in boring tasks viz. documentation) aren't unique to lipsers. Most of the good programmers, regardless of their language choice, suffer from this mentality, and a lot of good stuff comes out of it. CLOS is cool - I…

The results (many many packages doing fifty to eighty percent of what you need) are what drove me from Perl and what makes me very uncomfortable with the growing disdain for the standard library in Python. I really don't want to write my own XML libraries or whatever, I would rather just import whatever the standard solution is. I also do not want to have to do a roundup of the available solutions and try to figure out which is…