From the late 80s through the early 2000s Lisp was my language of choice. The post author went through many of its advantages -- mostly true. I even went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less)
Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off.
I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't as elegant as Lisp.
The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated. In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include. It's just a slightly different way of thinking.
The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases. Oh wait, they are.
Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp. Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately. In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library!
The ironic thing is that you were doing it during the 90s, which is possibly the worst time to be a Lisp programmer ever and Lisp's "lost decade." Everything that came out of Symbolics got thrown away (RMS turned out to have been 100% right about that), no one was doing free software libraries except for Haible and Steingold (ok, huge exaggeration), and aside from CL-HTTP everyone completely dropped the ball on the whole web thing (AllegroServe only came out in 2000!).
What are you doing right now with Ruby? I remember a couple of years ago at a CRACL meeting the conversation turned to Naughty Dog, and someone (I think it was Chris Baker) was like "Oh yeah, Andy lives in LA. He's writing books now."
The only programming I'm doing at the exact moment are little hacking projects. But I did a whole bunch of backend "cloud" programming in 2006-2008, and I used Ruby for most of it. This included 90% of the backend for Flektor.com (now deceased -- but successful in that it was cool and we sold it to Fox) and all the backend stuff for Monkey Gods (monkeygods.com). At Flektor I actually started the backend in Lisp. At first ACL. Then they wanted thousands per server -- haha. Then we ported to CMUCL. But there were no libraries, and those we had were buggy. Even the MySql integration was buggy. The last thing you want is a flakey database library.
We switched to Ruby. Sure ActiveRecord was buggy too, but in a totally different way. The bugs didn't crash it, or put weird data into the tables -- they merely generated sloppy or incorrect queries (this was 2006). I could spot these and work around. And there were libraries for a LOT of stuff. Fixing bugs in the libraries was easy too.
Ruby also seems to have been designed as a practical language. There is a bit of distain in the Lisp world (or used to be) for I/O, as if it's dirty. Look at Scheme, it doesn't even have I/O in the spec (or didn't last time I looked). I/O is inherently a side effect, which to the functional thinker is BAD! Well I have news. Writing real programs is all about I/O.
Interestingly (maybe ironically?) it was reading about your success w/ GOOL and GOAL that turned me onto lisp! Are you using ruby for game development?
Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off.
I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't as elegant as Lisp.
The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated. In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include. It's just a slightly different way of thinking.
The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases. Oh wait, they are.
Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp. Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately. In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library!