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by iLemming·19d ago·view on hn ↗
I think you have very little insight to what you're talking about. The modern Lisp landscape is nothing like what it was in the 90s or even 2000s. The amount of practical shit Lispers been quietly building these days is genuinely impressive.

Have you ever seen GitHub language stats? Elisp there in the list a few points behind Lua, Elixir, OCaml and Haskell. The amount of Emacs Lisp on GitHub alone should be at least surprising. There's so much Elisp in the wild - the amount of it probably exceeds Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And let me remind you that it isn't a "general-purpose PL" - it's meant for one and only purpose.

Look at the number of package for AI-coding in Emacs¹ - 35 and counting. Mind that emacs has no central curated marketplace with the same discoverability as VSCode's. Packages live across MELPA, GNU/NonGNU ELPA, and countless personal repos, so a hand-counted 35 from a Reddit roundup is almost certainly an undercount of what exists in the wild.

And that's just one of the observable axes of Lisp. Anyone can join Clojurians Slack and scroll through #news-and-articles, just out of curiosity. It is hard to find a problem space today or a runtime where Lisp has not proliferated. Why? Because Lisp is enormously practical. Just because you convinced yourself it isn't, doesn't change a thing about reality.

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¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1uwm3c0/the_state_of...

1 comments
It's mostly hobbyism.

My point stands.

> My point stands.

Your point can stand, sit or jump around in a circle - makes no difference. Any ignorant fool can make a hollow point about things they don't fully understand and congratulate themselves in the process.

You can make similar "observation" about Linux on Desktop, mechanical keyboards, 3D printing and Raspberry Pi/Arduino tinkering and call them "hobby business".

You're essentially conflating "niche" with "unserious". By that logic Linux was a hobby OS and Git a hobby VCS - both literally started as one guy's side project, both now run the industry. Lisp is niche, not unserious: Clojure runs Nubank, Walmart, Cisco and Apple; Common Lisp ran ITA/Google Flights; and most of the features in whatever your favorite language is were Lisp ideas first.