Why don't people like lisp?

[Edi Weitz]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2003 03:59:07 -0400, mertz at gnosis.cx (David Mertz) wrote:

> I -did- do a little bit of Scheme programming lately (I guess before
> I was barred from all future downloads :-)).  Admittedly, this was
> starting from little familiarity with the language (and also I
> cannot get my little brain around emacs, and jEdit on my Powerbook
> doesn't seem to want to reindent for me--maybe there's a plugin to
> do that).
> 
> I found that about 70% of the mistakes I made during playing with
> variations on some (pretty simple) functions were because of
> misplaced parentheses (most of the rest were from a fuzziness about
> the different between strings and symbols; but I think I've worked
> that out).  I sure had to stare a LOT longer at those parens (and do
> lots of counting on my fingers) than I would have had to look at
> wrongly indented Python code.  In fact, this much would be true even
> compared to way back during my first few weeks of Python
> programming.

It is my experience that this definitely goes away very quickly if
you're actually using the language. When I started with Lisp some
years ago I initially had some problems with things like DO, LET, or
COND. It seemed to me as if I would forever have to look up the
definition and count the parens before I could use one of these.

It turned out that this only lasted for a couple of days. In fact,
once you get it, you realize that every single form in Lisp has
exactly the right number of parentheses and as long as you know the
arglist (tools like ILISP will help with that) it's a no-brainer to
know how many parens you'll need. Plus, should I ever make a mistake
with parens I'll notice immediately after hitting RETURN because Emacs
will get the indentation wrong.

As others have pointed out it is _essential_ to use Emacs or an Emacs
clone (like Hemlock or the editors coming with the commercial Lisps)
if you're going to write Lisp programs. Your editor should be able to
at least get the indentation right automatically, it should be able to
show matching parentheses, and it should feature a couple of
convenient ways to navigate through s-exps and lists, see for example

  <http://www.google.com/groups?selm=d6d7ef84.fsf%40ccs.neu.edu>.

Edi.