If it gives such a productivity boost, why aren't LISP shops outcompeting other languages?

Historically I think there's a very strong case that Symbolics did outperform others with their software productivity, especially in graphics. They had an ability to wade into certain domains and produce legitimately shockingly competitive products, which really should not have been possible.

But I also think Lisp leads to spectacular burnout as I think it imposes a greater cognitive requirement on the part of the developer.

A Symbolics graphics reel from 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4HXPJtym2Q

This stuff was still in use on Final Fantasy 7 https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-computers-used-to-do-3d-a...

> it imposes a greater cognitive requirement on the part of the developer

... because of the "monotonous" syntax? That was a reason mentioned by L Peter Deutsch in Coders at Work ...

I do think it's the relatively superficial uniformity of it, regardless of the level of abstraction at which you're operating, which eventually makes things crack.

My hunch is top performing lisp devs are capable of holding more of this in their head at once than mere mortals. A key benefit of more conventional languages is you can limit the scope of your concerns and reasoning (within limits), however, that does prevent you from being able to make whole system optimisations, which is notably what Symbolics (at least in graphics) were outperforming everyone else at. What the Symbolics devs achieved seems to me only viable by having an unusually capable team focused on a specific domain for a long time, without too much diversion/distraction. The bus factor must have been horrific.

This thread made me go off and look more into this, and I couldn't help thinking the software industry has really lost something with the commercial failure of these very deeply specialised and incredibly high end tools. (ICAD was the other). It's odd how people could justify spending huge amounts on the hardware just to run the software, but didn't want to pay for the software when it became possible to run it on just about anything, and so the software stops being developed.

In some small way I am revisiting the idea with https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

We'll see what comes of it.