The Programming Language Conundrum

I can recite many of such stories; of people keeping up with their ten person team by coding whatever the team did during the day in 2-3 hours at night using Squeak Smalltalk; about an old Lisp hacker working in a research setup with mostly Java colleagues and always estimating to need 10% of the time (and then actually making the estimate). Tooling for niche languages often is not as good as for mainstream stuff (quick, find a way to deploy a Pharo Smalltalk image on EC2 or in a container). Because, each in its own way, these languages encourage you to solve your problem in two steps:

Lisp is more explicit about this, but I opened an old Smalltalk image and the “application” language ended up being very high level, very domain specific, and just as hard to grok as your average macro-ridden Lisp system.

Source: evrl.com