In programming language design, one trope that comes up is the Curse of Lisp. What does it refer to? Well, a particular genre of programming languages (Lisps) is essentially immune to the network effect, unlike most other languages. This is because Lisp makes it very easy to write your own libraries from scratch; people who use Lisp tend to do that instead of reusing third-party dependencies.“But hold on,” you might say, “zero dependencies is often held up as an ideal to strive toward in softwar...