Humble Lisp programmers

Maybe from the headline you were expecting a blank post? No, that's not where I'm going.

Yesterday I was on Amazon.com and noticed that nearly all the books they recommended for me were either about Lisp or mountain climbing. I thought this was odd, and mentioned it on Twitter. Carl Vogel had a witty reply: "I guess they weren't sure whether you want to figuratively or literally look down on everyone."

The stereotype Lisp programmer does look down on everyone. But this is based on a tiny, and perhaps unrepresentative, sample of people writing about Lisp compared to the much larger number of people who are writing in Lisp.

Lisp has been around for over 50 years and shows no signs of going away. There are a lot of people writing Lisp in obscurity. Kate Gregory said something similar about C++ developers, calling them the dark matter of programmers because there are lot of them but they don't make much of a splash. They're quietly doing their job, not speaking at conferences or writing much about their language.

I imagine there are a lot of humble Lisp programmers. It takes some humility to commit to an older technology, especially given the pervasive neomania of the programmer community. It also takes some humility to work on projects that have been around for years or that are deep within the infrastructure of more visible projects, which is where I expect a lot of Lisp lives.

You can do very clever things in Lisp, but you don't have to. As Ed Post famously said, "The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." There must be a lot of code out there that writes (f x) instead of f(x) but otherwise isn't that different from FORTRAN.