This doesn't explain why you'd want to use Lisp at all really, and it pretty much ignores the many disadvantages.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
25 points (93.1% liked)
Programming
27841 readers
380 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I have come to think that Lisps are meta-progranming-only languages.
If you are into exploring programming languages or writing interpreters, lisp is quite an interesting language. I can also see it working quite well if you need to embed a small scripting language somewhere, because it's so minimal and easy to pick up, but also very powerful if you go into the metaprogramming side of it.
I don't see many reasons to use it for anything else though.
Because you hate yourself?
I will always remember the CS class I took that was taught in Lisp (it was the only class in that program that used Lisp).
It convinced me I did not want to do software engineering for my career.
I too still remember a Lisp based course class and I was like wtf is this. I think it was an AI class way way before it's popularity of nowadays.
Lisps are elegant and one of my favorite languages to hack with.