Right out of the gate, I will let everybody out there know that I only know Lisp from configuring my Emacs environment. Lately, I have been reading many articles and blog entries regarding Lisp along with Python and Scheme.
This blog entry from Bill Clementson, Lisp is for Entrepreneurs, really got my attention. Over the years I have been quite successful in most of my projects using Java (including J2EE/J2ME as well), C/C++, and even PERL. Based on these experiences I have found Java easiest to develop applications in. This includes the J2EE APIs which have come under fire over the past few years.
Due to my ignorance of Lisp for application development, I was bewildered by how Lisp had such an impact in time to market for both organizations in the article, Viaweb and Naughty Dog. This perception of Lisp‘s impact on their product‘s time to market from the developers interested me enough to start some more research on it. Also, to pursue some of the other languages, such as Python and Scheme, to learn how they may improve project delivery.
I am continually looking for ways to improve development team productivity through language, development style, and framework usage. Most of the recent development improvements I have seen came from service-oriented and test-driven application development methods. I hope to find another route through programming language to further improvement.
Let me know if you have any ideas on the subject of alternative languages for improving application development productivity. I am quite eager to learn more from others with good and bad experiences in this arena.
