>>152
They are retarded because the solution has been there the whole time, they've been told about it, and they choose to remain willfully ignorant.
Yes, but why have they choose to remain wilfully ignorant, this is the question! Not because they are too stupid to understand lambdas and higher-order functions (as PG argued), VB proves this. Why then? "Retards' ways are inscrutable", is that what your argument boils down, to wilful rejection of any attempts at explaining the phenomenon?
Here's an idea: maybe the immediate reason is that on one hand there are useful programs written in VB with lambdas, which makes VB codemonkeys to recognize the superiority of using lambdas, on the other hand there are no useful programs written in Lisp, which makes everyone with a grain of common sense to ignore Lisp?
Which was that if Lisp really boosts productivity that much and is used by good programmers, then programs written in Lisp should dominate FOSS at least.
Non sequitur. You must be the most naive motherfucker on the entire planet.
Nope. I see RoR mounting the webdev world precisely because it boosts productivity that much, and there are countless examples of that. There were no corporate backing, no aspie-flattering propaganda compared to PG's, just DHH in his $1000 shirt with a clear and loud message: I'm rich and famous because I developed such and such websites in a fraction of time it would take you with your PHP or whatever. You can be like me.
Similarly, C took the world by storm purely by virtue of demonstrating UNIX, how useful it is and how easy it is to port it on any platform.
This approach works. You show the virtue of your language by demonstrating useful programs written in it, and you get the snowball rolling, with more and more people contributing useful libraries, programs, examples, books.
Naturally, this approach doesn't work for Lisp, because Lispers
don't practice it. Instead of writing useful programs and showing them to the world they produce innumerable arguments about Lisp superiority on purely theoretical basis.
That doesn't work, no shit, Sherlock!
I repeat: programming is a branch of fucking engineering, it's not maths, it's not philosophy, your "logical arguments" are not worth half a shit. Like in physics, the experiment is what proves the theory, and nothing else.