Why don't people like lisp?

[Russell Wallace]

On 18 Oct 2003 21:44:53 +0300, Ville Vainio
<ville.spammehardvainio at spamtut.fi> wrote:

>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.

Depends. For a lot of things I agree with you, writing Python code is
very natural and straightforward. (I've decided my aesthetic dislike
of Python is such that I'd never be happy writing anything other than
throwaway scripts in it, but that's a different matter; aesthetics is
in the eye of the beholder.)

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

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