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Fabien wrote:
[Off topic]@Don: your theory is fine for US people, but lack of love for Lisp is also observed in non-English speaking places. I learned quite recently that the word "lisp" also had another meaning than "nail clippings in oatmeal".My guess would rather be that Lisp doesn't encourage common idioms and development approaches across people and teams, which makes it hard to:- get into code you didn't develop - work with more than a couple of teammates - find a library that addresses your problem- if you have several problems and find a lib to address each of them, get those libs to work together despite their incompatible macro hacks.That, and Lisp took waaaay too long to acknowledge its platforms. It pretended to be OS independent, which meant many non-standard, non-compatible ways to interface with OSes, and therefore, plenty of platform issues as soon as you wanted to port or deploy a non-trivial solution. As written somewhere by Paul Graham, "Unix has won, get used to it".
Now that's some spot-on criticism of Lisp, much better than the "too many parenthesis" excuse that gets thrown around by linguistic homophobes suffering from cognitive dissonance.
I'm still waiting to hear somebody claim that they refuse to use XML and HTML because they have too many parenthesis (angled brackets). Or for somebody who hates Lisp's parenthesis but tolerates XML and HTML to explain why <foo>bar</foo> is easier to read than (foo bar).
Perl and C++ have way too much punctuation in general, and Ruby made a cargo cult design mistake in imitating Perl syntax. I agree with Guido van Rossum's comment on Ruby: "I find Ruby's syntax grating (too many sigils)".
http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=146149Wow, in what language does lisp mean nail clippings in oatmeal, and where can I get some of that stuff? It sounds delicious!
"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -- Jamie Zawinski, on X-Windows toolkits.
-Don