Why Lisp?

John and Pierre are two of the smartest lisp programmers out there!

> and then they say "this language is Turing complete and therefore should be able to do anything you want it to do."

i'm pretty sure that no designers of modern languages would say anything as naive as that.

> sible in Lisp was the implementation of an object oriented programming system without having to change the compiler!

haven't people done that using C?

> This meant that all code written in Python 2 could not be leveraged in Python 3

not all python 2 code could be directly "leveraged", but it certainly could be translated, and has been.

don't get me wrong - i like lisp, but this article would not convince me if i was thinking of coming to it as a newbie.

Code is difficult outside of small teams. Period. Libraries, macros, annotations, build systems...

> When you have a running program you can compile functions, redefine classes, etc. all while the program is running. You are changing the internal state of the image.

This can surely be convenient in certain cases, however most of the times I find myself playing around with unit tests rather than with a single running process. Unit tests are small and fast so I don't even notice any inconvenience with the traditional compilation approach.

The irony of this comment is that HN is written in Lisp.