the question is inspired by the unhappiness with “the LISP experience” exhibited by certain posters in a previous thread if the partisans of LISP loved it so much, why didn't they adapt it to other frameworks? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
It seems that there is a big COBOL legacy maintenance problem. I have seen mentions of research/innovation, both of academic variety and of actual tools sold by ISVs, that purport to help owners of COBOL legacy to maintain it. To use terms borrowed from a recent thread of mine, such tools are bandaids sold to address insurmountable problems faced by this sector of industry.
How about LISP or any LISP dialect that may go by another name? Are there legacy codebases in that? If the answer is yes, is there a shortage of people who could adequately maintain them (as is the case with COBOL) or is it, to the contrary, the case that there are more than enough programmers who know and love LISP, who would jump on the chance of getting a job working with their favorite technology?
Professional programmer here.
While I’m sure there is some LISP code running some important system out there somewhere, it’s not a lot. Definitely nowhere near as important as COBOL. (And by the way, I think the important of COBOL is exaggerated, too. It’s still around, but we’re made much more progress transitioning off it than a lot of people think).
But as for LISP – there is not nearly enough LISP code out there to ever cause a widespread maintenance crisis. Not even close. I judge this on the anecodotal evidence that
A) I hang out in circles where I meet programmers from many different industries in many different languages. I meet developers who use really ancient languages like APL, even. But I’ve met very few non-academic programmers who are employed in a LISP related job. (A number claim to love it as a hobby, though).
B) if there were a lot of LISP code requirining maintenance, then there would be a lot more LISP related job postings on monster.com or dice.com or techies.com, etc. I do occasionally see a posting or two, but it’s unusual.
LISP is/was popular in academic circles, but for whatever reason, it never really got much traction in industry. Yes, there are a few niches (scripting in Emacs, for instance) and yes, a lot of ideas from LISP were incorporated into more recent languages. Javascript, for instance, is arguably LISP without the parenthesis syntax. So LISP is important in a historical ideas sense, but not in a “the internet would collapse without it” sense. (No matter what Paul Graham may claim)
I think that legacy Lisp code can count on more than competent coders to work on it; even if it’s just because more pro lisp programmers do not actually code lisp most of the time.