The complainers are non-users; it's just a meme, like picking on Cobol.
So many computing languages have come and gone over the years; the number that have been created vastly outnumber those that have ever been popular, let alone that are now popular.
Lisp is amazingly vibrant as a family. People are still excited about it and there is development work going on. That's amazing for something with such old roots.
I added two instructions to the virtual machine this morning, and used them in the compiler of a Lisp dialect to eke out a little performance gain. Wo hoo!
Of course they are not. If you put on a shoe, and it's uncomfortable, you just go get a better shoe that is. This does not negate the validity of the question: why was the first shoe uncomfortable?
Lisp always catered to people with a certain state of mind. It was never a language positioned for popular appeal, and by that I mean the masses of 9-5 "brogrammers" we have today. Looking at how many people fall in love (or not) with SICP, today, and the reasons they give validates this line of reasoning. Lisp and SICP are meant for inquisitive thinkers and hackers who are willing to go DEEP. If you can superficially dismiss Lisp (and all the geniuses that worked with and improved it over the years) in the manner that you do, then certainly, Lisp is clearly not for you. You are not an artist. You are most definitely not a hacker.
You seem to think that popularity should be the prime consideration when it comes to programming language design. This is what gave us PHP and Javascript. I dare say that the people that use Lisp today (and there are plenty of those) do so because nothing else will be as good to them. They love the language. I've known people who moved jobs and got less money in order to work with Lisp. What does that say about the language?
If we go with this analogy honestly, we have to recognize that the vast majority of the programming world is hobbling around in prescribed footwear, and a good lot of it has bits of gravel and broken glass.
So many computing languages have come and gone over the years; the number that have been created vastly outnumber those that have ever been popular, let alone that are now popular.
Lisp is amazingly vibrant as a family. People are still excited about it and there is development work going on. That's amazing for something with such old roots.
I added two instructions to the virtual machine this morning, and used them in the compiler of a Lisp dialect to eke out a little performance gain. Wo hoo!
The haters can all go stuff it.