https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

The power of Lisp is its own worst enemy.

An interesting essay on the “Lisp curse”, the idea that Lisp’s power can sometimes be a disadvantage for developers. The core idea expressed as a question: how hard is it to add object-oriented features to a language? In the C world it’s happened twice, giving rise to C++ and Objective-C, an no-one would even think about defining their own. In the Lisp world, by contrast, building that style of object-oriented extension is a weekend’s work (assuming we didn’t already have CLOS, which is in many ways superior anyway). The point is that it’s relatively easy to build even complex features as libraries, meaning there’s less reason to standardise, and this leads to a proliferation of mutually incompatible designs that solve 80% of the problem – but all a different 80%. This then makes interoperability difficult.

In fact the essay goes farther, to argue that the sorts of people who write Lisp tend not to be the sorts of people of work well in the political and compromise-driven world of standardisation. I’m not sure how true that is, given the stability of the Common Lisp standard itself since its adoption in 1994, but it’s an interesting reflection on how increased language expressiveness need not automatically be a strength.

(Some of the links in the article are now broken, or point to what looks like an AI link farm.)