The problem with Lisp (or at least Clojure) is that abstracting away the boilerplate requires you to correctly identify the boilerplate.
It’s nontrivial to structure your entire AST so that the parts you abstract away are the parts you’re not going to need direct access to three months later. And I never really figured out, or saw anyone else figure out, how to do that in a way which establishes a clear pattern for the rest of your team to follow.
Especially when it comes to that last part, I’ve found pragmatic OOP with functional elements, like Ruby, or task-specific FP, like Elm, to be more useful than Clojure at work or various Lisps for hobby projects. Because patterns for identifying boilerplate are built in. Personal opinion, of course.
Yes, good tooling shouldn't have boilerplate. Minimizing loc (within reason, not code golf) is the best thing you can do for maintainability. Unfortunately things like Java are popular too.
I hear you. But removing boilerplate via abstraction (Lisp) is very different from generating it on demand (LLMs). The former is obviously qualitatively better. But it requires up front design, implementation testing etc. The latter is qualitatively insufficient, but it gets you there with very little effort plus some manual fixes.
> The latter is qualitatively insufficient, but it gets you there with very little effort plus some manual fixes.
I remember years ago, when I worked at a large PC OEM, I had a conversation with one of our quality managers -- if an updated business process consumes half the resources, but fails twice as often, have you improved your efficiency, or just broken even?
"Qualitatively insufficient, but gets you there" sounds like a contradiction in terms, assuming "there" is a well-defined end state you're trying to achieve within equally well-defined control limits.
There’s necessary complexity like error handling, authz, some observability things, etc. which can’t be trivially abstracted away and needs to be present and adjusted for each capability/feature.
Maybe my brain has been permanently altered by hacking Lisp.