Why don't people like lisp?

[Björn Lindberg]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:

> > The approach for Lisp is to write a domain-specific language for the
> > problem at hand, and then to write the program in that domain-specific
> 
> Right.  People who fancy themselves as language designers will surely
> be happier that way.  People who prefer to use languages used by better
> language designers than themselves, such as me, will be happier with
> Python.

Any programmer writing a program is by necessity also a language
designer. The act of writing a program consists of designing a
language. Did you read Steele's "Growing a Language", which someone
posted a pointer to earlier in the thread? It is essentially about
Java, but is very enlightening on the "programming as language design"
issue.

There is nothing magical or special about syntactic abstraction. It is
just an abstraction mechanism like the rest of them.


Björn