Why don't people like lisp?

[Kenny Tilton]

"Francis Avila" <francisgavila at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<voobanm4rs7p68 at corp.supernews.com>...

> who are used to english, it's just plain different and harder, even if it's
> better. (Ok, that last bit was a value judgement. :)

Fortunately, misinformation does not "stick" very well. ("Oh, it's
/not/ interpreted?" and then they are OK). The trick is getting folks
to the point where they are even looking in Lisp's direction. Which
you already said:

> ... it's hard to convince someone of that if they
> don't actually _use_ it first, and in the end some will probably still think
> it isn't worth the trouble.

Yep. Old habits die hard, tho for many just looking at a page of Lisp
is enough to get them excited. The same syntax that looks like just a
lot of parentheses is ...well, they do not even see the
parenthe-trees, they see in a flash the forest of the beautiful tree
structure. (How's that for fucked-up metaphor?)

I cannot say I have that ability (I saw the parentheses) but I always
suspend disbelief when trying something new just to give it a chance.
Parentheses disappeared /real/ fast.

>...  It will take very significant and deep cultural
> and intellectual changes before lisp is ever an overwhelmingly dominant
> language paradigm.  That is, when it becomes more natural to think of
> cake-making as....

Wrong. For two reasons. The first is social. Developers move in herds.
So Lisp just has to reach a certain very low threshhold, and then it
will catch fire and be used in Tall Buildings, and then developers
will dutifully march down to the bookstore and buy a new set of
O'Reilly books.

The second is that you are just plain wrong about paradigms. You (and
I!) have used the proedural paradigm so long that we think we think
that way.

Follow my URL to info on my Cells hack. It let's you build normal
applications with a spredsheet paradigm. I just gave a talk on it at
ILC 2003. Sitting in the audience was they guy who gave a talk on
something similar at LUGM 99, when I was sitting in the audience.
Afterwards two people came up to me to tell me about their similar
hacks. They are the future presenters. The original prior art on all
this was Sketchpad in 1962. Now my point:

It is a great paradigm. An order of magnitude better than the
imperative. I kid you not. Nothing brain-bending about it. But we (as
in "almost all of you") still program as if we were writing machine
language.

Why? Because we think that way? Nope. Look at VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3
and other real spreadsheet applications used by non-programmers to
build sophisticated models. They are non-programmers and they are
having a ball and it all makes perfect sense to them. So much for
people cannot think functionally / declaratively.

The developer community is not ignoring Cells or COSI or KR or LISA or
Kaleidoscope or Screamer because they do not think that way, but
simply out of habit. Let's not dress up habit as innate-way-we-think.

kenny

http://www.tilton-technology.com/