"A community that has a deeply ingrained culture of NIH."
Lisp is a NIHer's heaven. I know something about it, I've just spent 3 years learning new stuff and reimplementing the universe with it (I'm not done yet. Give it some decades...). Learning Lisp is a friggin' Pandora box. It gives you absolute power (that corrupts you absolutely), it makes you discover crazy powerful and sometimes hard to implement paradigms (ex: Dataflow), and of course you have to try to implement them so you simply never get anything done. Sure, you do things The Right Way, but the investment in implementation and learning time is absolutely prohibitive. Gotta admit I'm not sure if Lisp made me a NIHer or I was just drawn to Lisp because I'm one but Lisp sure is an aggravating factor for that.
A few days ago I finally decided to STOP LEARNING and STOP REIMPLEMENTING THE UNIVERSE for a few months so I can finally launch my startup (some utility site for a niche MMORPG).
Same experience with Lisp / Scheme here. There's a truly awe-inspiring amount of computer science research published about Scheme, in particular. I learned a TON, but I also learned that if I'm actually trying to get stuff done, I'm better off using something else, such as Lua or Python.
Lua, while even more Scheme-like than Python, was designed primarily for use as an embedded scripting engine in another languages (typically C or C++). Instead of putting effort into making Lua clones of typical libraries, they worked on making re-using other languages' existing libraries quite easy. It seems to stand the whole NIH thing on its head, too. (Though, languages such as Chicken Scheme that compile to C can inter-operate better than most.)
"A community that has a deeply ingrained culture of NIH."
Lisp is a NIHer's heaven. I know something about it, I've just spent 3 years learning new stuff and reimplementing the universe with it (I'm not done yet. Give it some decades...). Learning Lisp is a friggin' Pandora box. It gives you absolute power (that corrupts you absolutely), it makes you discover crazy powerful and sometimes hard to implement paradigms (ex: Dataflow), and of course you have to try to implement them so you simply never get anything done. Sure, you do things The Right Way, but the investment in implementation and learning time is absolutely prohibitive. Gotta admit I'm not sure if Lisp made me a NIHer or I was just drawn to Lisp because I'm one but Lisp sure is an aggravating factor for that.
A few days ago I finally decided to STOP LEARNING and STOP REIMPLEMENTING THE UNIVERSE for a few months so I can finally launch my startup (some utility site for a niche MMORPG).