Why don't people like lisp?

[Ville Vainio]

danbmil99 at yahoo.com (dan) writes:

> Lisp failed (yes, it did) because of the parentheses.  Normal people

Lisp hasn't failed as long as emacs is around, and uses Lisp.

Actually, one of the problems with Lisp might be the steep learning
curve. Lisp does not offer the instant appeal of Python. The most
common initial impression of Lisp is "yuck" (parens), while w/ Python
it's mostly "wow, I didn't know code could be so readable and
powerful" (though the whitespace is sometimes an issue, the shock
might last for several minutes). 

Now that neither Lisp not Python has the idustry-dominating status
(unlike Java, C++), instant appeal matters a lot. If people are
expected to hop in as a hobby, Python wins hands down. It takes just
3-4 toilet sessions (if you have the habit of reading in toilet) to
master Python, whereas w/ Lisp you have to hack the code for a
while. And still, you can't read the code fast enough; it's fast
enough to write, but reading can be painful initially (unlike perl,
where the pain lasts indefinitely). 

Lisp offers a bit more power than Python (macros), but after a while
with Python, one notices that none of the power that is missing is
actually even needed. Python has just the right
features. Period. There are one or two warts (dangling variable after
list comprehensions comes to mind), but the language as a whole feels
natural. Lisp feels natural if you are writing a compiler or want to
be as orthogonal as possible, Python feels natural for most (all
except drivers/applications with extreme performance requirements) of
the real world applications.


> The world is moving in the direction of languages like Python, that
> fit naturally with how we speak and write.

Yes it is; that doesn't mean that Lisp would be dead after a while. At
least not until emacs supports Python natively :-). Seriously though,
Lisp is one of the more programmer centric (== least evil) languages
around, loved by programmers and shunned by the managers. If Python
(and ruby, which I view mostly as a Python with different syntax)
weren't around, Lisp would be the language of choice for most
pythoneers.

Hmm, I guess I should leave usenet alone on saturday nights, but what
the heck :-).

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