Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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There's something about Lisp that seems inherently individualist. At this point, the Lisp community seems to encourage that idea, but what in the language itself supports this?

I think the people that choose Lisp select it after a study of the various options. Choosing and evaluating programming languages is not a social activity -- you do it by yourself. Contrast this to Java programmers, who use Java because it's what they learned in school. They aren't individualistic, they just do what they are told.

(Java's popularity is helped by the "tools" are "easy to use". SLIME and Emacs are "hard to use", so you have to want to use them to be able to use them. I use quotes because I disagree with the sentiment. Eclipse is a nightmare to use. Emacs is a dream.)

As for Java's popularity, I think it comes down to social factors rather than differences in the syntax of the language. Java developers want less money than Lisp developers. It's also easier to hire Java developers, because you can just require a Sun certification. Easy!

I don't think that's true. Lisp jobs are few and far between; people who want them really want them. There are many jobs that are like that. Here in the UK nurses and firemen are badly paid, that's because there's always someone who wants the job enough to do it for barely living wages.

The only way to be a well-paid Lisp programmer is to work somewhere where they wouldn't even dream of using Java.

I've found that the better a job suits me, the more they are willing to pay me. (I have never looked for a Lisp job, though.)

So you'd say that more Lisp-users tend to be self-taught / come to the language themselves, rather than using $current_job_security_language?

This isn't specifically about Lisp vs. Java, though - I don't see people have this sort of kneejerk reaction about Python, for example. (Though Python seems to have been carefully designed to give a first impression of being clean and easy to use. I'd say it mostly is, but it definitely gives a good first impression.)

> Java developers want less money than Lisp developers.

This wasn't true even 5 years ago. People flooded into Java/J2EE because it was considered 'Enterprise' and paid a lot more than alternatives.

Even today Java pays more than .NET or Rails and certainly PHP in large companies.

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