Why don't people like lisp?

[David Mertz]

|I suspect you pasted in validly formatted Python code:
|Before proceeding to indent it for display:

Nah... that's not the specific error I made.  It's plausible, sure.  But
I rather hastily wrote the code directly in my newsreader, rather than
in a Python shell or Python-aware editor (and made some other
non-indentation errors in the process too).

Of course, then I copied the same function a couple times to create
variations of the behavior... never noticing the error in each of them.
Definitely a kicking myself moment (as I wrote in the subsequent post...
admittedly not belaboring every individual error).

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.

But maybe that error will go away over time.  I have some doubts, but
also an open mind.

Yours, David...

--
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies
of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the
underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons.  Intellectual
property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.