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Comment by baudehlo | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that he says (in the other article he links to): "In fact, in a number of cases I saw people whip things up in Perl in a couple of hours that would have taken me days or weeks to do in Lisp.".

So therefore Perl > Lisp > everything? (I'm kidding for the humour impaired)

What he gained from using Lisp was not worrying about memory management, and built-in data structures that made life easy. These days you can get that with a lot of different languages (and I would argue that Java is not one of those languages), languages that also perform as well as Lisp.

So what's my conclusion? That I think there are both - genius programmers who can code well and quickly in just about any language, and also languages that let you build things a lot faster than traditional languages.

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My guess is that you didn't seriously learn functional programming in any language.

It is not just about memory management and data structures. It is about functions as first class objects, no side effects, lazy evaluation, closure, monads. The fact that you can basically write a compiler in an hour as a first year student (that was exercise 3 in my course).

I'm not a programmer, I'm a DBA. The code I write is mostly short and ugly scripts in Perl and Bash. I can do very little Java and almost no other language. The one and only time I used Lisp was in my first programming course in the university. Incidentally, it was also the one and only time I enjoyed programming.

That would be a bad guess. For a start, Lisp is not a functional language. It just has some functional features. It has side effects.

I learned FP using Haskell, which is a pure functional language.

But I still stand by what I said. I code faster in Perl than I do in Haskell due to the availability of libraries. The "pure FP" features may make some things theoretically cleaner, but they don't honestly make things that much easier. Having access to FP features (map, grep, reduce, closures in particular) is significant, but access to built in data structures (hashes in particular) make life so much easier than C or C++ or Java.

I'm sure baudehlo knows, but some other readers may not: map, grep, and closures are all native in Perl 5, and reduce is easily available. (All are native in Perl 6.)

reduce is "included" - it's just in a loadable module in the core library.

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