When I was in college, the physics department had a LISP machine that run LISP in hardware to run Macsyma faster.

I don't doubt LISP has its pluses, and I most certainly agree that using an appropriate tool is much more important than 'using what everyone else is'. That PHB approach reminds me of Andrew G's quote about businesses paying anything to be able to say "We have no choice!".

For what I'm doing now, I need a lot of flexiblity (so it's easy for us to customize -- and for our customers to do a bit...how much will depend on the customer). Since I want others, who aren't professional programmers, to be able to do some bug fixing and simple modification, I needed a language that was easy to learn. And, since I don't have time to re-create libraries, libraries for GUI, databases, COM, etc are essential. So far I've been very happy with my choice of Python.

I do think the author underestimates the importance of libraries. Of course, good programmers are good at stealing the work of others, even in other languages (e.g. the Tk GUI has been used for all kinds of languages, e.g. Python (Tkinter) and Inferno).

And, when embedded programming is considered, especially my favorite area of factory automation, there are a whole different set of concerns. Available memory and processing speed can be quite constrained, along with the added pressure of real time constraints. I don't think anyone will be writing ISR's in LISP anytime soon.

One of these days I'll publish a rant on the state of factory automation programming. It's pretty sorry overall, and could certainly learn a LOT from Computer Science.

Tony