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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

As I recall, a fairly generic critique of lisp is that as a language of incredible power and open structure, you wind-up with many implementation of many functionalities in many libraries but few of them are finished and the API for these tend to not be very well defined.

See;

http://www.shenlanguage.org/lambdassociates/htdocs/blog/bipo...

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You are describing any open source library written in someone's spare time.

And this essay is such baloney I don't even know where to start.

I find it helps starting with the most egregious issue/concern first. Otherwise your argument is merely an appeal to self-declared authority.

That's what the essay is doing. But in my more than 10 years (not 20) of using Lisp I have seen nothing to support the hypothesis, let alone to diagnose a psychiatric condition to a group of people.

Then there is this gem "If you read many posts discussing Lisp (including one in comp.lang.lisp called Common Lisp Sucks)" ... " The problems are soluble (Qi is a proof of that for God's sake), but when you're down everything seems insoluble. Lisp is doomed and we're all going to hell."

Lisp is doomed because nobody likes his pet project or appreciates his insults. This essay is just one big insult, I'd prefer people stop disseminating it.

1++

There's an article about graph processing in java from the early 2000s. Author tried a few java libraries with exhaustive APIs, all were cumbersome, cemented and incomplete. He ended up hacking a better one out of cons lists that did more faster and shorter.

I think Lisp lives way too far from the "proper" engineering practices to fir in the reading grid.

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