Lisp is a joke

Lisp is a cult, it wants to stay a cult, it will always be a cult.

Being a Lisper means getting to say you work in a self-obfuscating, condescension-granting “powerful” language so you can look down on people. That is the cult. That is the community.

It’s been decades now. Lisp isn’t going anywhere. Dozens of “inferior” languages have risen, producing operating systems, the internet, office suites, web browsers, software that has transformed the world.

Lisp hasn’t produced any of that. As far as I can tell, it’s produced a text editor (EMACS). That is its crowning achievement.

Lisp is a great intellectual exercise. You can learn a lot with it. But it’s not a collaborative language. It’s not. It’s a language for a single programmer. And it’s achievements are all largely at the scale of a single good user.

And if the IQ requirement for entering the Lisp cult is so high, I ask whether the allegedly superior productivity of lisp is due to its smarter people rather than the language?

Lisp is pretty annoying even if you don’t program in lisp. Programming forums get polluted with useless posts on lisp, useless posters talking about lisp, downvote armies of lisp. It’s so annoying.

A classic, emotionally stunted group of adolescents living in a ratty clubhouse in a tree yelling at all the kids in the yard about how cool they are, but not letting anyone up the tree.

Someday, someone may make a language like lisp, but somehow never get it branded lisp. But frankly, modern coding is more about good library support and API support than what dialect of turing-complete computation expression you use. The hated Java made its bones that way. But that’s a real-world concern, not one for the kids in the lisp clubhouse.

Haskell is a cult, it wants to stay a cult, it will always be a cult.

Being a Haskell means getting to say you work in a self-obfuscating, condescension-granting “powerful” language so you can look down on people. That is the cult. That is the community.

It’s been decades now. Haskell isn’t going anywhere. Dozens of “inferior” languages have risen, producing operating systems, the internet, office suites, web browsers, software that has transformed the world.

Haskell hasn’t produced any of that. As far as I can tell, it’s produced a window manager (xmonad). That is its crowning achievement.

Haskell is a great intellectual exercise. You can learn a lot with it. But it’s not a collaborative language. It’s not. It’s a language for a single programmer. And it’s achievements are all largely at the scale of a single good user.

And if the IQ requirement for entering the Haskell cult is so high, I ask whether the allegedly superior productivity of haskell is due to its smarter people rather than the language?

Haskell is pretty annoying even if you don’t program in haskell. Programming forums get polluted with useless posts on lisp, useless posters talking about haskell, downvote armies of haskell. It’s so annoying.

A classic, emotionally stunted group of adolescents living in a ratty clubhouse in a tree yelling at all the kids in the yard about how cool they are, but not letting anyone up the tree.

Someday, someone may make a language like haskell, but somehow never get it branded haskell. But frankly, modern programming is more about syntactic expressiveness and potential for efficiency given programmer time invested rather than never mutating anything no matter the cost. The glorious Lisp made its bones that way. But that’s a real-world concern, not one for the kids in the haskell clubhouse.