I appreciate this article by someone who is serious about contributing useful solutions to the world--not just the social aspect of programming--and appreciates a language that empowers him to develop those useful solutions as readily as possible.
When I'm not programming I like to get some distance from my work and hang out with people who have diverse interests. When I'm serious about programming I use Common Lisp. When I'm serious about connecting with other people I use English. Many people seem to confound these pursuits and end up with languages that compromise weakly between talking to people and talking to computers.
For me, programming is about solving business problems ASAP in a manner that is amenable to a long series of minor improvements over many years. Having a stable language standard with language improvements happening as add-on libraries is a huge win. My old code keeps working, so I can stay focused on improvements instead of bailing water.
Also Lisp has the seemingly magical property of being one of the easiest languages to read, understand, and reason about by programmers who have the aptitude to learn it--and it scares the pants off of people who don't. With all of the "expert programmer" pretenders out there it's helpful as an employer to have something that separates the serious programmers from the pretenders.
When I'm not programming I like to get some distance from my work and hang out with people who have diverse interests. When I'm serious about programming I use Common Lisp. When I'm serious about connecting with other people I use English. Many people seem to confound these pursuits and end up with languages that compromise weakly between talking to people and talking to computers.
For me, programming is about solving business problems ASAP in a manner that is amenable to a long series of minor improvements over many years. Having a stable language standard with language improvements happening as add-on libraries is a huge win. My old code keeps working, so I can stay focused on improvements instead of bailing water.
Also Lisp has the seemingly magical property of being one of the easiest languages to read, understand, and reason about by programmers who have the aptitude to learn it--and it scares the pants off of people who don't. With all of the "expert programmer" pretenders out there it's helpful as an employer to have something that separates the serious programmers from the pretenders.