I code in LISP for fun and for some strange reason, I never found the parenthesis brain twisting.

I guess the reason for few lispers (everywhere not just Nigeria) is the relatively small and dwindling community; too many people aren't talking about LISP so too many people aren't bothered about LISP. When people talk of LISP its usually about robotics and AI and thats boring talk for a whole lot of programmers. And then the parentheses is an absolute turn off for many.

I personally have a goal to build a self navigating rc with LISP doing the AI.

tundebabzy: I code in LISP for fun and for some strange reason, I never found the parenthesis brain twisting.

I guess the reason for few lispers (everywhere not just Nigeria) is the relatively small and dwindling community; too many people aren't talking about LISP so too many people aren't bothered about LISP. When people talk of LISP its usually about robotics and AI and thats boring talk for a whole lot of programmers. And then the parentheses is an absolute turn off for many.

I personally have a goal to build a self navigating rc with LISP doing the AI.

I've investigate lisp and contrary to what you may think, it will never die.
There's a new java lisp implementation - not clojure (which is a language) but
- an implementation. released this year.
There's always going to be a small but ever steaming interest in it.
Anybody who's studied the history of programming languages will at some point
ask himself - Y all the rage about lisp - and maybe/ investigate it.
Many programmers dont dig lisp - but then, many people cater to mass taste -
and the majority (most hyped lang) rules but then mass taste is commodity quality not so rich or exotic.
Then on the flip side, theyr only so few hours of the day to pursue hobby interest,
more especially in programming where a project could cost so much time , leaving
lil left for other things in life. no time to chase a non commercially viable lang!!
but this is poor thinking in the long run.

[quote author=kambo]

I've investigate lisp and contrary to what you may think, it will never die.
/quote]

I'm not sure I implied that LISP was on its way to extinction. LISP is the second high level language after FORTRAN and FORTRAN is not dead. The numerous LISP dialects of which clojure (used by akamai, citigroup, Twitter's Backtype, etc)is one shows that LISP is very alive but simply not a popular language. Infact, most of us learnt about LISP because of Paul Graham's essay right?

Fayimora:
still don't see a practical reason to have that.

Mozart is based on the Oz language. The diagram below shows its practical application.
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf

Fayimora:
This statement couldn't be more wrong! Except you have proof that this is true, you are very wrong, sorry. I have friends(devs) that learnt how to program with Javascript on webpages. Now they write ruby, python and even Scala. I know someone who learnt how to program by writing mobile apps. Not everyone starts with C and family.

That's one route , some take.
But except you'll run a poll asking the bevy of programmers how they learnt how to programme.
I'll say that MOST programmers went the desktop way.
for 1 you could google - "how you learnt how to programme and read the reviews"
The crop of programmers you mention are more of people who learnt programming recently say within the past 5 years or so. but that's not enough basis to create a contradiction . neither is that a sure base to
make a generalization. With the trends changing,in the next 10 years most recent programmers may not be learning
programming from a puter. more like from a phone or the latest miniaturized gadget.

I said typical programming is learnt in desktop mode : the traditional way. like its taught in uni's and computer schools.
some people learnt vb then transitioned to c (high level to low level)
others were graphic artists then programmers . there's no clear cut route but theres a prevalent ,prevalent is the
word, more typical approach most people used.
Your friends , had the benefit of visual feedback,which is very encouraging.
visual here excludes the console feedback. like what you'll get from a dos prompt.
Which is what i stressed about lisp. a language that doesnt give better visual feedback can be a turn off to users.
people want to see,visualize data.
one thing i've seen with most people though is that its harder for people who are into lightweight progrmming languages
, ruby,javascript,php,perl to transition into "lower level" harder core programming!!.
they seem to kind stay stuck in the scripting level!!
But guys who got hard core find it easier to wade into scripting (ruby,python,php) and straddle hard core programming
also. its my observation.

Fayimora:
I have never resented a language like Ruby for not having something like swing and I don't know someone who does.

ruby and php etc,if learnt from the web programming angle, give instant feedback. sending information to be displayed in a web page.
This can fill the place of gui, and is more appealing than a console screen.

Fayimora:
... Funny enough, even my small apps are always comprised of about 2 languages minimum. You need to do some concurrency/scheduling, get an Erlang expert to write a middleware. You need to write an SPA, get an EmberJS/Angular/Backbone expert. That's how the industry works now bro!

After one has gotten comfortable with the basics of programming and its underlying philosophies
, he can choose any route he wants.
Your small app uses many software stacks. ok.
what stack does a program like textmate, run on. notepad++ etc?.
or the 1000 line program a budding programmer may write in language x? or isn't it still software he's making? though
not in a hodgepodge of many languages?

That has nothing to do with the appeal of a language to a newbie or d inquisitive which is what the issue is all about.
when emacs was written, i dont think the author was thinking in terms of "software stack" or "current industry trends"
He just implemented his idea in a language.
Neither did linus think of "how the industry works"
but b4 they could get to a point where they can think of a language as a "writing tool" , somethings could
discourage learning. in this visual age, its possible to learn with console/no gui approaches, but
after being spoiled with gui and instant feedback and visualzation of data, a language without these facility
could get really tiring to use.
a visual basic , java, qt developer may get into lisp and start playing around,
but to really test his knowlegde and create an app that synergises all he's been learning so far he may
want to create something with a gui.
lo and behold, getting a gui library may be a bigger hurdle than he thought,
the look may be outdated and unsightly (c types)
the gui library may lack good documentation which is typical with open source toolkits.
that may discourage him from exploring the language further.
mayb to keep his job, he may learn it but except for that, or mayb to write some back end ,
but languages with gui's pack mor appeal and attract more learners. my gloss.

Really nice comments from programmers here about why one language may be preferred to the other and situations to which it may apply. It was Alan Perlis who was credited with saying " A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." There's more at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis. And the way to be certain about this is to read the rationale for whatever language it is that you are using. What problem is it trying to solve and what are some of the thinking that influenced it's desgin. And none of this should replace sound computer science foundation like knowing what turing machines and recursion are and there relationships with set theory or collections.

Giving the above mindset of rationales I can say I'm in clojure because of http://clojure.org/rationale. Rich data structures fostered on immutability. Strong concurrency semantics and primitives. Sequence abstraction. Polymorphism over inheritance. Under rated Object Orientation. Simplicity over complexity inter alia.

I once registered for some programming languages at the same time. I had to unfollow some so I can seriously follow others. I have video tutorials on scala by Martin odersky himself and also some video tutorials by George kizcales a co founder of Dr Racket. I would like to know your experiences on scala and Dr Racket.I left both to face c# & peep into python. what can be achieved using scala or racket. I Will appreciate responses from senior programmers like fayimora, kambo,tunde et al