alt Hacker News> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude.
SICP tells me otherwise.
Replies
Are you using a 42 year old book to find flaws in my argumentation? Let's talk real, contemporary numbers.
NuBank: from ~12M customers in 2019, grown to 25M in a year, then to 48M at IPO a year later, then to 114M in 2024, to 131M in 2025 - 991.67% growth within 6 years and still going. Not in theory, not conceptually, not because "SICP has told them". They did get-the-shit-done. Not acknowledging that Datomic and Clojure has something to do with this succes would be simply a dishonest gesture.
Walmart - the canonical "Clojure at scale" story. The eReceipts system processed every purchase across 5,000+ US stores plus online/mobile, built and maintained by just 8 developers. Architect Anthony Marcar's line after Black Friday: the system "handled its first Walmart Black Friday and came out without a scratch". They cited 5-10x less code than alternatives.
Apple - known for using Lisp for a long time.
Metabase - open-source BI. ~46k GitHub stars.
Amperity - customer data platform, "99% Clojure" - their own quote.
Netflix - been using Clojure since forever. Watch their talk from the last year's Conj. It's eye-opening on stability of complex systems.
Cisco - malware analysis platform. Multiple huge Clojure projects: IROH - Incident Response Orchestration Hub, CTIM/CTIA - Cisco Threat Intelligence Model and API, etc.
Braintree/PayPal - payments backend. CircleCI. Grammarly (this guys are on SBCL)
And that's just a short list of actual, real, profitable businesses built with and maintained using Lisp. I don't know what "SICP has told" you, but maybe you just need to look around, things have changed a bit since then.
SICP, as beautiful and good as it is, is probably responsible for a large amount of the misconceptions and negative thoughts about Lisp. SICP isn't a Lisp book, it's a Scheme book, and the Scheme culture is at least as different to Lisp (Common Lisp and its ancestors all the way back to McCarthy) as Java is to Python.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on to CS as a discipline.)