The world's most popular functional language, and what it teaches us

I realized today, when I read the phrasing of this LtU post, that my last two posts were too pessimistic about functional programming languages. There is, of course, at least one very popular functional programming language, and that is Emacs Lisp. Emacs Lisp is even widely used, at least a little bit, by countless programmers who never use any other functional programming languages at all. But this just confirms my original hypothesis that language popularity is driven almost entirely by platform, not by characteristics of the language itself.

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