Why don't people like lisp?

[prunesquallor at comcast.net]

mike420 at ziplip.com writes:

> 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. 

Depth 25 isn't really that bad.  Consider a simple LET expression:

(let ((x (+ a b)))
   ...)

That + is four levels deep in parens.  There's a few similar sort of
constructs that end up being somewhat deep.  For example, look for an
item in a collection by it's nickname, if it has one:

(cond ((find item collection 
             :key (lambda (thing)
                    (or (thing-nickname thing)
                        (thing-name thing)))) ...)
      (....))

THING-NICKNAME is 6 levels deep.  Wrap something like that in a
handler-case, and you'll be up in the 20+ parenthesis in no time.

The 25+ thing I found was an unusual coincidence of several of these
`parenthesis-rich' constructs together.  It was `logically' much
shallower.