I'm going to guess this question has been brought up before and maybe you have some links to some great talks on this kind of stuff but ... I'm watching an Alan Kay talk and sometimes I can't help but wonder if maybe the reason everyone isn't use Smalltalk or Lisp or Haskell or some Visual programming Environment is not because they are all stupid but because those systems actually have other problems. I can give the example of my experience of Lisp. I wrote some incredible macros that would sort data at compile time to be cache friendly but that also meant anyone who wanted to use my code had to understand my macros. Maybe that's not fair since to use anything you have to understand it but it just got me wondering, like I know I feel more productive in JavaScript (usually) than say C# but I think that's probably because I'm writing relatively small things that are all in my head. As soon as I was on a team I'd want a typed language since it would help spread the knowledge of how things work? Smalltalk often mentions the entire environment is written in smalltalk and modifiable live. That sounds great for experimenting but horrible for every day use. Imaging running

stpm

(smalltalk package manager) and having no idea how much of your environment was just modified. To make this topic too big, have any of you written an algorithm in a visual programming environment? For example A* or some rectangle packing algorithm. Anyway, just curious if you know papers on why not lisp, why not smalltalk, why not VLPs, why not haskell, etc..