“Stop Writing Dead Programs” by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022) (opens in new tab)

HN is written in Arc, which is a lisp derivative that runs on top of Racket, which has the same runtime inspectability as almost every other lisp, and for PG's public relations board, it was a good choice.

Rusher is full of s** though. It isn't really a case of, "this one was ahead of it's time, this one's behind". It is a case of trade-offs. I can dash off all kinds of cool stuff in Racket or Clojure, in record time w/ minimal lines of code. Good luck getting someone else to understand it though, and good luck getting me to understand it after a year away from it. With a larger code base, built-in compile-time type enforcements are huge--and as an afterthought, with macros, on an opt-in basis does not count. Aaron Swartz had Reddit re-written from lisp to python for similar reasons--not strict types, obviously, but having more syntax than parentheses is a big win when new hires are trying to understand the system.

Same story with APL: brilliant as a desk calculator on steroids, clumsy for nearly everything else. Or C, the indispensable bit-twiddling language; only a sadist would want to write an application in it, but it's still pretty darn indispensable for the tight spots where performance matters (drivers, AAA video games, AI maths, crypto, etc). I'd say that all the way up until the late 80s, all of the spots were "tight spots."

It's like the Bret Victor cult--a demo of a game-maker program that used javascript as its intermediate representation. It had been done hundreds of times before with different IRs, and the model is entirely appropriate for making 2D video games. Raise the dimensionality, or change the problem, and the model breaks down, but he conveniently ignored that, because it is more fun to get up on the podium and play programming prophet than to do the work of making a language that actually has legs.