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?

>>46

In reality, can you take any arbitrary piece of software and tell what language it was written in?

If it's open source, sure.

From this, your original postulation that "there is no good desktop software written in Lisp" is not valid.

Show me good desktop software written in Lisp. Your appeal to ignorance is ridiculous, oh yeah, we don't know and can't possibly know, what if there's a lot of software secretly written in Lisp lurking everywhere, but the authors hide this fact from everyone including the lists of totally not toy we promise software written in Lisp.

An earlier draft of >>43 also had mention of a critical mass that is required for widespread adoption. There may well be desktop/GUI CL software, but unlike JS and Python, nobody popular has dedicated any blog posts to the fact (I assume because they are busy making money instead of blogging about whatever hip framework came out last week).

nobody popular has dedicated any blog posts

Are you like 15? Have you heard about this guy called Paul Graham? He runs an obscure tech site hackernews.com, and he also funded this even more obscure site called reddit.com, which was initially written in Lisp btw (that's one legit superior use of Lisp: get funding from PG, six months later rewrite your entire shit in Python over a single long weekend), and said Paul Graham has made a post or two on how Lisp is a totally superior language and using it makes you a programming genius.

I mean, if you're actually 15 and has only recently been let on the internet unsupervised, you might get this impression that Lisp is an obscure language that gets mentioned mostly by prague trolls. I've been around five-ten years ago and I'm telling you: no software technology has ever been hyped as hard as Lisp was hyped back then. You couldn't read a slashdot article on penis enlargement without a gang of smug lisp weenies informing you that you're wasting your time and should read SICP instead.