Unfortunately, the post spends most of its length on the author's professional history. It is only towards the end in which he spends a sentence or two talking about when he "lost his faith" in Lisp, but still gives not a lot of reasons. Basically, as far as I can tell, there are two major points: he used to think Lisp is great, but (1) no-one else seems to be using it and (2) the perceived superiority of Lisp was debunked when he observed experts in other programming languages.
Perhaps his priors were a bit off (seeing Lisp as the holy grail of all programming languages), but I think it is still fair to ask why Lisp has failed commercially? This has been discussed before, however (Lisp "wars" in the 80s, AI winter, etc.)
I find the way he ends his post interesting, where he argues that Lips has to evolve and improve. The article is from 2002 and in the mean time, a lot has actually happened in the Lisp world. New dialects like arc and clojure have created a renewed interest in Lisps. It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.
I think you summarized his reasons correctly, but I see his reasons as faulty.
(1) assumes that if a technology is good, it will see steady adoption over time. This is not true. See "Why didn't the Romans have hot air ballons" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264998
About (2) I want to phrase my criticism carefully. To be clear, I'm not saying that Ron is a generally egotistical person, any more than your typical programmer, or than myself. What I am saying is that (2) is an egotistical line of reasoning. It's akin to seeing someone take a better picture with a cheap camera than you take with your expensive one, and losing faith in expensive cameras. Or like listening to someone make a song sound better on an upright piano than you make it sound on a grand piano. The Python programmers who knocked him off his high horse at Google are not proof that Python is better.
To be fair, at the time that reasoning was supported by a fair amount of data. To that point I had built a fairly successful career by doing (by my perception) very little work relative to my peers, and I ascribed that success to the leverage I got from using Lisp. I may have been wrong, but it was a defensible position given the available data at the time.
When you saw others not using Lisp and matching your productivity, you concluded that Lisp wasn't giving you as much leverage as you thought. The egotistical part is ignoring other possible explanations. Maybe those people are just really smart, and don't need all those nice Lisp features to help them think. (I personally benefit a lot from macros helping me think.)
Unfamiliarity? Discomfort? The choice could be emotional as opposed to intellectual. Smart people can spend a lot of time and effort defending the status quo.
> It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.
I am very encouraged by the developments of the last 9 years. Clojure in particular is a Good Thing (notwithstanding my on-going allergy to Java), and even the Common Lisp landscape to day is much improved over what it was in 2002. Clozure Common Lisp in particular is wicked cool, and I'm using it for some hacking projects on the side. But when it comes time to do something industrial strength it would still be a very tough call for me even today.
I would love to do a Lisp-based startup, and a CL based startup in particular. If anyone out there shares this interest please let me know.
So I was a little disappointed when I found out
on day 1 that I had been assigned to the ads group.
But that disappointment turned to dismay when I learned
what my assignment was to be: I was the lead engineer
on a new advertising system code named "adstoo", what
eventually became AdWords. That part wasn't so bad.
The bad part was, this was going to be the inaugural
Java project at Google. Google, which had until now
been a Java-free zone (which was one of the reasons I
took the job) was going for Java in a big way, and I,
the consummate Java hater, was supposed to be its
chief evangelist.
Just peachy.
Perhaps his priors were a bit off (seeing Lisp as the holy grail of all programming languages), but I think it is still fair to ask why Lisp has failed commercially? This has been discussed before, however (Lisp "wars" in the 80s, AI winter, etc.)
I find the way he ends his post interesting, where he argues that Lips has to evolve and improve. The article is from 2002 and in the mean time, a lot has actually happened in the Lisp world. New dialects like arc and clojure have created a renewed interest in Lisps. It would be interesting to know what the author thinks of these developments, and whether they could revive his personal faith.