> The philosophy of Lisp encourages writing your own libraries because it's so easy to do. You're expected to know how to program if you use Lisp; not to depend on tiny prewritten functions in the npm universe that may or may not solve your problem, that may or may not be written in a secure or efficient fashion, and that possibly pull in a million transitive dependencies you don't need.
Some people love to point out how stupid JS programmers are because of the left-pad incident.
The reality is that, in almost every domain, there are many things which are either difficult and/or time-consuming to implement, or common across several projects and tasks. Do you really want to waste your own time and the time of your teammates reimplementing these things for every project if you don't need to?
Even if the underlying implementation is "easy", having a handful of well-tested libraries with thoughtfully-designed APIs is important for productivity in many (most?) programming tasks. Yes, there might always be a specific case when you can't use the popular library for X, but that's the exception and not the norm.
"It's easy to write your own libraries" is true in any professional-grade language. Arguably it's one of the things that makes a professional-grade language professional-grade. It's not a justification for having a bad library ecosystem, it's a rationalization.
As a side note, I think the Lisp library ecosystem in 2021 is pretty good, considering how unpopular it is in industry.
Agree. I find it super easy to write my own libraries in C++/Java/Haskell/… but it is silly to do that when somebody else have already spent years creating a great library you can just drop in and use in a few minutes.
Some people love to point out how stupid JS programmers are because of the left-pad incident.
The reality is that, in almost every domain, there are many things which are either difficult and/or time-consuming to implement, or common across several projects and tasks. Do you really want to waste your own time and the time of your teammates reimplementing these things for every project if you don't need to?
Even if the underlying implementation is "easy", having a handful of well-tested libraries with thoughtfully-designed APIs is important for productivity in many (most?) programming tasks. Yes, there might always be a specific case when you can't use the popular library for X, but that's the exception and not the norm.
"It's easy to write your own libraries" is true in any professional-grade language. Arguably it's one of the things that makes a professional-grade language professional-grade. It's not a justification for having a bad library ecosystem, it's a rationalization.
As a side note, I think the Lisp library ecosystem in 2021 is pretty good, considering how unpopular it is in industry.