LISP needs marketing, that's all. (Score 1)

My experience with LISP and it's MIT dialect, Scheme, where at the University, where I would imagine 95% of all other programmers have their initial and perhaps only encounter the languages, unfortunate as that may be. I was very impressed with the flexibility that LISP gives the programmer in terms of angles at which to attack a given problem. Whereas with procedural or imperative languages one might be a bit corralled by the semantics and structure of the language, LISP can mimic any language paradigm, and so allows the programmer to use the thought process best suited to the task. Paul Graham gives an implementation of an object oriented language in LISP in his handbook, ANSI Common LISP, to illustrate this point. I work now for federally funded company whose primary interests, one would think, are not in the commercial viability of their tools but in their effectiveness. However it seems that we end up using a lot of commercial off the shelf products simply because of the hype that inevitably precedes them in this day and age. I am fully convinced that everybody here would be programming happily in LISP if it were the case that LISP was marketed by SUN as unflaggingly as Java has been over the past few years. I think this is true despite the fact that Java was tailored to the programmer's familiarity with C, because LISP syntax is SO easy to learn. Sometimes I wish LISP were picked up by some huge company. A company with the resources to fill those massive bookshelves at your local megastore with vapid texts touting the grandeur of their new LISP virtual machine. Then the fun of programming could really begin!