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Sadly Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Julia, OCaml, F# and Haskell jobs are quite scarce.

For example, right now, I can only see ~50 LinkedIn EU Clojure ads. A dozen more mention Clojure but it does not seem to be the main focus of the job.

Would love to be proven wrong, though. Perhaps these jobs are sometimes not advertised via LinkedIn.




I would love for my next job to be in Common Lisp.

I do have a concern though. I see that at lots of companies the job is not a Go job or a Python job or a Javascript job, but a Go-at-Foocorp job or a Python-at-Bazco job or a Javascript-at-International-Clowns-Inc. job. What I mean is that the team have built so many leaky abstractions atop the core language, and added so many third-party tools, that the learning curve is steep and the skills non-transferable. On the one hand, who cares? We’re human, we can learn. But on the other it means that it can take significantly longer to ramp up and start delivering value than one would prefer.

What’s this have to do with Lisp? Well, while a well-written Lisp system will be faster to pick up and get started on that one in a less-powerful language (i.e., almost all of them), a poorly-written mess will be much, much slower. My concern is that I might leave a pretty good situation for what ends up being a dumpster fire — and then have to find a new job too quickly.


That's so true, you can write Fortran in any language! I've seen great Java codebases and atrocious Clojure out there.

Developing good non-over-engineered abstractions is hard. But with Lisp it's a bit easier.

Some places do abuse macro DSLs and you can end up, as you said, working on a local language with no transferable skills.




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