Perhaps lisps do not benefit from progression in libraries; creation of new resources; and don't need to change often enough to warrant new documentation.
What does it mean when a language becomes less and less useful without its specification being progressively changed, with the commensurate documentation changes? What does it mean that a language has tons of questions on Stack Overflow?
It would seem that an ideal language is one whose specification is static so that old and new resources, libraries, and documentation remain perpetually useful. However, such a specificationally-static language can only be itself perpetually useful if it is properly flexible to the needs of the programmer. I hear that at least some Lisps are quite flexible, though I unfortunately don't have a good way to fathom/define what constitutes flexibility.
Not true: LISP would've benefited greatly from at least one core usage and set of libraries that were easy-to-use with lots of uptake. Call it the Python effect. How it's been used and expanded is quite amazing. LISP could've done more but wasn't restrained enough by community. The reasons for this are social, not technical. Probably best explained here:
Meanwhile, languages like Ocaml, Haskell, and Python pick up the ball by trying to include plenty of power but in constrained and standardized ways that benefit from communities. Results are paying off. There's a few LISP's that do the same thing with better results than prior LISP's. Hopefully, those will keep getting uptake as I think powerful and constrained languages each have something to offer. Best to develop both in parallel, esp as one can implement the other. ;)
> What does it mean that a language has tons of questions on Stack Overflow?
That it's used by script kiddies, passionless code monkeys and management types (tm) (I wouldn't really know about the latter). The clueless copy pasta code is what hurt PHP's reputation, I hear (but again, I wouldn't know much about it except for the comments I read).
What does it mean when a language becomes less and less useful without its specification being progressively changed, with the commensurate documentation changes? What does it mean that a language has tons of questions on Stack Overflow?
It would seem that an ideal language is one whose specification is static so that old and new resources, libraries, and documentation remain perpetually useful. However, such a specificationally-static language can only be itself perpetually useful if it is properly flexible to the needs of the programmer. I hear that at least some Lisps are quite flexible, though I unfortunately don't have a good way to fathom/define what constitutes flexibility.