Why don't people like lisp?

[james anderson]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> 
> ...
> Lisp-aware editors do not solve the problem of reading Lisp code
> embedded in text, as with OnLisp formatted .ps or .pdf.

well, to the extent that they indent consistently, they do. one trains ones
eye to ignore the parentheses. perhaps one may have misinterpretated the
resistance to tyrannical indentation. one very effective way to read lisp
attends to the indentation and ignores the parentheses. the compiler does not
do this, but the eye does. different eyes are trained differently, but the
principle remains.


for instance, if we take m.kowalczyk's example. a competent lisp programmer
could just as readily interpret the text below, as interpret the text with
parentheses. the parenthese are redundant information which aids
disambiguation - eg where numerous forms are on a single line, and corrects
errors, but fairly early on one no longer "reads" them.


 defun mostn  fn lst 
   if  null lst 
       values nil nil 
       let   result  list  car lst   
             max  funcall fn  car lst    
         dolist  obj  cdr lst  
           let   score  funcall fn obj   
             cond   > score max 
                    setq max    score
                         result  list obj   
                    = score max 
                    push obj result     
         values  nreverse result  max    

practice. one suggestion would be to find an old mac and download a copy of
mcl. if you can get along with a mac, it really is the easiest of the lisps to
break in with.

...