I think this is not a bad description of "the Lisp Curse." I definitely wasn't mature enough for Lisp when I first learned it---high on my knowledge of what was possible, surrounded by myopic fools, as I thought.
But that was years ago. I'm mature enough now. It is possible.
In my consulting work my partner and I have marveled at how managing technology projects is a skill --- learnable, but only with some effort and practice, and carrying relatively heavy requirements of being technically competent and having a context of the business.
That's the skill that's needed, IMO, to make Lisp "work." Lisp itself---and Clojure---are really not complicated languages. My boss teaches them to undergrads and they can be productive fairly quickly. They are complicated when someone has built a crappy, leaky tower of abstractions on them. Recognizing when you're in danger of doing so, and when it's not worth it given other factors (business value, maintainability, etc) is the key.
In the HyperCard thread on the front page right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20550189), someone linked a talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nd9DwCdQR0&feature=youtu.be...) on the history of educational software, and one of the presenters said something like, "Some technologies we are simply not mature enough for."
I think this is not a bad description of "the Lisp Curse." I definitely wasn't mature enough for Lisp when I first learned it---high on my knowledge of what was possible, surrounded by myopic fools, as I thought.
But that was years ago. I'm mature enough now. It is possible.
In my consulting work my partner and I have marveled at how managing technology projects is a skill --- learnable, but only with some effort and practice, and carrying relatively heavy requirements of being technically competent and having a context of the business.
That's the skill that's needed, IMO, to make Lisp "work." Lisp itself---and Clojure---are really not complicated languages. My boss teaches them to undergrads and they can be productive fairly quickly. They are complicated when someone has built a crappy, leaky tower of abstractions on them. Recognizing when you're in danger of doing so, and when it's not worth it given other factors (business value, maintainability, etc) is the key.
So I wonder, idly, if metaprogramming---no, really, the meta of programming, like "Don't Call Yourself A Programmer" (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... ) and "Developer Hegemony" (https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Hegemony-Erik-Dietrich/dp/0... )---might develop some more, esp. among the Lisp communities. When the language is no longer the barrier, you start to realize that other things are.