Why don't people like lisp?

[Ville Vainio]

wallacethinmintr at eircom.net (Russell Wallace) writes:

> However, this really applies only when you're doing things the
> language designer anticipated. The great thing I find about Lisp is

When I'm really doing something the language designer didn't
anticipate (and the required features don't already exist), I'm
probably doing something wrong and need to revise my design
anyway. You can do a whole lot in Python, esp. as you can code parts
in C if you really need that.

> that when I'm doing something the language was _not_ designed to
> handle, it's not an "oh shit" problem, it's a "well, I suppose I can
> do this with a few macros" problem.

One can always go to c.l.py and ask, only to see that the problem is
easily solved in plain old Python. I think the benefits of Python far
outweigh the theoretical scenario that I actually needed some feature
that isn't there, and could be done in Lisp. Most often the missing
features involve not having a library to, say, access some database,
and I doubt Lisp has more than Python to offer in that area.

Meanwhile, people are voting with their feet: a lot (thousands? don't
know the exact figure) of people are taught Lisp (well, Scheme, but
anyway) at colleges/whatever every year, and they abandon it in a
blink of an eye after the course (obviously this might be because the
courses emphasize functional programming). Many even think that C++,
of all things, is easier!

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24