I love lisp. Well, scheme and less so clojure. I don’t know why. Is it macros? Is it the simplicity? Or is it just nostalgia from learning it during a time in my life.
But I just can’t find a place for it in my life.
It’s not job material, effectively nobody uses it. It doesn’t solve basic problems with ease like Python does.
And because of this, anything I do in it is nothing more than a toy. As soon as i put it down, I have no hope of picking it up or maintaining it in 6,12,24 months later.
A toy I spend 2 weeks in absolute joy, but as soon as life gets in the way it is dead.
I’m old, I have other shit to do, and I don’t have the time. If I’m writing code, I’m doing it because there is a problem that needs a solution. Either solving someone else’s ‘problems’ for $$$, or an actual problem at home.
If it’s a short term problem like “reorganising some folders” I’m not going to (re)learn another language. I’m going to smash it out in 30mins with whatever will get the job done the quickest, then get back to doing something more important.
If it’s an ongoing problem, I’m going to solve it in the most sustainable way possible. I might fix the problem now but 100% someone’s going to drop support or change an API in 2 years time and it’ll break. Sure, doing it in Chicken would be fun. But the odds are, I won’t remember half the shit I learned 2 years later. It’ll be unmaintainable. A forever grind of learning, fixing, forgetting.
So without a commercial driver to actively invest in Lisps, there’s no point. It’s not profitable and It doesn’t solve any problems other tools can. Without the freedom youth brings, I don’t have the time to do it “for fun”.