A thought-provoking essay. He describes the Lisp Curse as follows: "Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp." There's a lot of problems with this formulation; his examples are pretty compelling, however. - Michael Nielsen

Would you state some examples of the problems you see with his formulation ? - Clark Kent

When my research took a turn for the numerical about 3 years ago I seriously looked into lisp, because it seems ideally suited to what a physicist wants: it's dynamically typed, does all the memory management for you, a small "vocabulary" (so easy to learn and remember), elegant, and runs almost as fast as C or Fortran. I decided against it, more or less for the reasons cited in this article - there's no standard way of doing things and all the libraries, implementations etc. seem to be rather balkanized. In the end I opted for Python (which does most of the above except for performance) and then rewrite the bottlenecked bits in C. - Sean Barrett