There still seems to be interest in the project. The forum gets new topics posted every few days [1] and Anarki, a community ran fork of Arc, shows recent commits [2].

[1] http://arclanguage.org/forum

[2] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

They were converting from Arc to Racket, but I don't know how much ended up being done (https://github.com/hubski/hubski/wiki/Converting-Arc-functio...).

Not really. It's true that few big winners have used Lisp, but that would only disprove the thesis if there were also companies who tried using Lisp and failed. AFAICT, no one is even doing the experiment.

I actually know of two notable counterexamples: Barefoot Networks has an internal design tool written in Common Lisp that is a significant source of competitive advantage for them. Also Orbitz.

According to Alan Kay, Smalltalk was an explicit attempt at making something as dynamic as Lisp, but where one wasn't "coding in your data representation." There was very high representation in the Fortune 500, and some very big business applications. Much of the natural gas in North America was scheduled on a Smalltalk application. JP Morgan used Smalltalk to manage very large portfolios at one point. I could go on about the applications I know about personally for hours, actually.

The line blurs, however, as Java was very much inspired/influenced by Smalltalk, as was the CLR and C#. Ruby and Python were also highly influenced by Smalltalk. Javascript was influened by Self, which was effectively the "Son of Smalltalk." Smalltalk, at one point, was also cited as being a "blub" language. (No templates, no macros, no explicit multiple inheritance...)

But did they succeed because or despite those languages?

Would they have been even more successful and would their code have been more maintainable, more easily exapandable, had more power or more flexibility had they used Lisp?

Had to look that up — do you mean a blub language?

What browser are you using that you are not redirected to https://yc.dev?

>Most major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE 11 and Edge) also have HSTS preload lists based on the Chrome list. (See the HSTS compatibility matrix.)

Anyhow, it would be rejecting the argument of the blog post to link to it there, and the blog post itself is a bit of an increase incoherent mess (the author proudly identifies as female, adopting one label, and seems to equally proudly adopt the tech worker label, yet rejects the woman in tech label with the argument that rejecting all labels is essential to inclusivity. This is both incoherent on a surface level, and deeply problematic in that labels are the interface the human mind uses to deal with the world; rejecting all labels is rejecting all ability to model and interact with the world.

That's a valid viewpoint. But I don't see the "echo chamber effect" you're talking about. I think most people seeking out the "Ask a Female Engineer" series are aware of other viewpoints that exist.

The main thing I wish they would do under that heading is link to the category, not just one of the blog posts. https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/ask-a-female-engineer/

At the same time, I'm skeptical of attempts to increase the number of women in STEM fields, especially those sponsored by major tech companies or venture capitalists. They seem like thinly-veiled attempts to increase the pool of potential workers and decrease wages - the same way that these tech companies lobby to increase the number of H1B visas. I think the best way to work towards ending discrimination towards women in the industry, and also discrimination towards immigrants (without decreasing wages) is organizing tech workers collectively.

Libraries, documentation and community are reasons to use non-Lisp languages for certain projects, but if you don't have some kind of Lisp in your toolbox, you're still missing out in 2019, in my opinion.

If you go to http://yc.dev, you get an HTTP 307 (Internal redirect) to https://yc.dev.

https://get.dev/#benefits says: >The .dev top-level domain is included on the HSTS preload list, making HTTPS required on all connections to .dev websites and pages without needing individual HSTS registration or configuration.

Hopefully someone who knows the details could chime in on that.