Paul Graham is a LISP dude.  He likes LISP.  He preaches LISP.  This made me very interested in LISP because I find his writing to be interesting. 

Joel Spolsky is also an interesting writer.  He has mentioned LISP several times in various essays.

Taken together this provides curiosity about LISP.  I’ve downloaded SCHEME and played with it.  On the surface it seems an interesting concept.  You define functions which you can then call.  Not too far out.

I’ve also come upon the recent Reddit-LISP-convert-to-Python controversy and this inspired some thinking on my behalf. 

I will concede that LISP is the most powerful language in the solar system.  Maybe GOD (GOD Over Djinn) wrote the universe in LISP.  If so why didn’t he provide the nice standard libraries for sockets and threading that the Reddit team would eventually need?

I’m interested in these ideas because I recently started using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript which are both languages with a similarity to LISP (or maybe the better description is “cheap knock offs of LISP” or maybe “actually useable versions of LISP”?).  Of course as an avid reader of the sources I’ve mentioned above I was more readily willing to try Ruby.  My background is in Microsoft technologies and Java.  I started in VBScript then I went to Visual Basic then to .NET with C# and then to Java and now back to classic ASP and ASP.NET with C# and Visual Basic. 

I’ve learned that .NET and Java the platforms are roughly equivalent in power with Java having the longevity advantage which provides for all kinds of open source resources and a mountain of documentation.  Java can run on multiple OS’s and I used to work for a company where this was important, now I don’t so this is no longer an issue for me.

Now LISP claims the title as most powerful.  I would append this to “theoretically most powerful.”  If it is the most powerful why do people stop using it because it can’t do what they need?  Why did Paul Graham have to write his back office code in Perl and his image manipulation in C if LISP was so powerful?  Why does Joel Spolsky write FogBugz in ASP classic? 

It comes down to libraries.  Java is the king of libraries.  I can find Java classes to do anything.  NET is catching up.  JavaScript is going to rule client side software.  So why am I using Ruby?  Because I can get most of what I need to get done very fast and there are a lot of libraries for Ruby available.  Not as many as Java or NET but no deal killers yet.  It’s cross platform.  I develop on a Windows machine and deploy to a FreeBSD machine with no problems. 

Maybe one day I’ll get around to truly learning LISP but it will probably be after I’ve written my killer app in a more powerful language…