> If nobody understands the software (or the tools the software depends on, including the build chain), then when someone other than the original magician has to fix something, you're stuck.
Well the great news is that its Lisp, the language is simple. You have the same problem with other languages, except if you used C++, everything just got a magnitude more complicated, both because the whole thing is more complex and the ecosystem is changing and developing more rapidly.
With Lisp, the language is simple. But everyone writes their own DSL on top of the language because the language is simple. It's easy to do in Lisp, but it's also easy to make it incomprehensible to anyone else. I've heard this called "the curse of Lisp".
I've seen lots of programs written in lower-level languages that are incomprehensible because the patterns were macro-expanded by hand 1000 times and it's impossible to get the big picture.
I can't say I've ever seen a Lisp program where abstraction made it incomprehensible. That seems to be a common meme, though. I'd love to see an example.
I don' know how bad it is for Lisp, but I get the argument and I think its valid. I've seen to much bad non-idiomatic and homegrown code to know this is a big poblem. A big part of the value of using e.g. Spring Framework is that it is standardized, easy to understand and devoid of a lone hacker's "brilliant" ideas.
I think the part about the toolchain/dependencies still stands.
Well the great news is that its Lisp, the language is simple. You have the same problem with other languages, except if you used C++, everything just got a magnitude more complicated, both because the whole thing is more complex and the ecosystem is changing and developing more rapidly.