Why don't people like lisp?

[Greg Menke]

mike420 at ziplip.com writes:

> 
> In fact, Lispers take pride in the obscurity of their code. It's part of the
> fun of using Lisp. Proof? Recently in CLL-CLP, someone complained that most
> (C/C++/Java) programmers do not know what they are doing, writing all their 
> code as functions that span 300+ lines. On the other hand, Joe Marshall and
> someone else touted writing Lisp code that has 25+ nesting levels. Others
> approved such practice. I think 25+ depth is much worse than 300+ length. 
> The _minimal_ example is
> 
> ((((((((((((((((((((((((()))))))))))))))))))))))))
> 
> I don't want to see *real* code that has 25+ depth, I'll have nightmares.
> 

Its not as bad as you think it is.  The deeply nested code is likely
divided into a sequence of distinct "modules" that accumulate, use and
dispense with local state as they execute.  There is likely some
overall state that is also manipulated, but its likely that only leads
to a few of the outermost indents.

An editor like Emacs will let you skip from sexp to sexp without
having to count parens and indents, so you can navigate at whatever
level of detail you want.  If you're using an editor that cannot
navigate expressions like Emacs can, then any large or deeply nested
function in any language is going to be very difficult to manage.

Its somewhat analagous to using a computer controlled milling machine
to handle repetitive work vs using a manually operated machine to do
it.

Gregm