Abstract Heresies: Lisp vs. golang
Unorthodox opinions on computer science and programming.
It's no secret that I'm an aficionado of Lisp. It's my go to language, especially when I don't know what I'm doing. I call it research and prototyping, but it's really just playing around until something works.
We had a need for some auditing of some of our databases at work. They ought to agree with each other and with what GitHub and CircleCI think. It took a couple of weeks part time to prototype a solution in Common Lisp. It showed that the databases were in 99% agreement and found the few points of disagreement and anomalies that we ought to fix or look out for.
I want to integrate this information into a dashboard on one of our tools. I prototyped this by spinning up a Common Lisp microservice that returns the information in JSON format.
But management prefers that new services are written in golang. It would be easier for me to rewrite the service in golang than to try to persuade others to use Common Lisp. It also gives me the opportunity to compare the two languages head to head on a real world problem.
