
The Myth of the Super Programming Language - pw
http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=392
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crazydiamond
Sadly, not much in the way of any reasoning. Paul Graham etal have give
reasons why they think Lisp is great, and their secret weapon. What is authors
reasons for saying that is false.

I used to program in a hugely popular language, in which it was a pain to even
open a file. It took ages to find out how to open it in append mode. How to
format a decimal ... moving a piece of code into a try catch block was
painful. Often one's productivity can suffer due to a language no matter how
proficient one is in it.

Given the same amount of expertise in 2 languages, if i can write the same
feature in much less time in one language, then it is more powerful.

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three14
Don't you think the burden of proof is the other way around? We see selection
effects all the time. Shouldn't you expect super programmers to get more done
because they're simply better programmers?

It's a strawman argument to say that, "well, Lisp is more powerful than
assembly." Of course. But is it more powerful than C#? Maybe, but the Lisp
advocate should be the one asked for proof.

~~~
crazydiamond
iirc, the Lisp guy did offer some proof. Like macros.

One aspect that should be remembered is availability of libraries to do your
tasks. I've read that CL just did not have a good enough set to use. Reddit
was written in Lisp and then moved to python. One reason was threads, the
other was that py had a lot of stable libs that could be reused.

