The Lisp Paradox

Inferior tools allow less intelligent people to create what those with greater intelligence are unable to create with Lisp.

What does this paradox mean?

Are people who choose to use Lisp actually less intelligent than people who use other languages? Is Lisp actually inferior to and less productive than these other languages? Do the few people who are able to accomplish something in Lisp actually choose it for bragging rights, the way handicaps are used in sports?

Why do people put assembly language and Lisp in the same category of difficult languages? Shouldn't the high productivity of Lisp make it one of the easy languages, like Visual Basic, Python, PHP, and JavaScript? Why is it considered a difficult accomplishment to create something useful in Lisp?

>>31

People do useful stuff with non-mainstream languages, it's you that isn't seeing it. Everything you ask about is slanted towards popularity and direct commercial promotion.

No, it isn't. Let's count only the productivity applications installed on my home computer. Hmm... From about twenty most important (not counting unix utils) only Total Commander is entirely Closed Source, and it's developed by a lone programmer with no pointy-haired bosses bossing him around. None are written in Lisp.

Also, of course people do useful stuff with non-mainstream languages, that's actually my entire point, that being non-mainstream doesn't prevent a language from being used for producing useful software. So being non-mainstream is not an excuse for the fact that Lisp isn't being used to produce useful software. Which it isn't.

There is a lot of flexibility of backend web software to use whatever language people prefer, and there is Erlang, Lisp, Go, Haskell, etc floating behind the scenes of a good many projects, even at major places like Google.

First of all, no Lisp even there (if we don't count the retarded dialect powering hackernews). Second, it's pretty convenient to make a claim that can't be verified, eh? Third, explain why exactly super-intelligent programmers are limited to back-end web software, what is it about Lisp that prevents it from being used to make desktop software?