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=146149
Wow, 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
