"You can't get to the moon by piling up chairs." Home About Loper OS Guiding Principles RSS Feed Contact PGP « You have made your bedrock, now lie in it. The Performance of Lisp, or Why Bean Counters Need Bigger Bags of Beans » Where Lisp Fails: at Turning People into Fungible Cogs. A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse.  Talk of cultural problems , “the library question” (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation – one which is able to make sense not only of the obscurity of Lisp, but of many other conceptual breakthroughs (such as reflectivity ) which threaten to give developers’ minds a “lever to move the whole world.” Employers much prefer that workers be fungible, rather than maxima...