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You underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax. If JavaScript had had Lisp syntax, then every
by nessus42 10y ago
You underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax.
If JavaScript had had Lisp syntax, then everyone would still be using Flash. Or some other plugin that provided a language with a more popular syntax.
- lacampbell 10y agoYou underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax. IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL. JS is a first language for a lot of people - because their goal was to make a website do something. Scheme would not have been any different.
- nessus42 10y agoIME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL. IME many computer programmers learned Lisp in college and for some reason hated it–I think in part due to the syntax and in part because they had a hard time with recursion and other "mind-bending" concepts. They often still harbor an irrational precedent to this day. Me, on the other hand, I loved Lisp as soon as I learned it. (Perhaps I was primed by having learned APL in high school.) I changed my major from Astrophysics to Computer Science because I felt that SICP was even cooler than black holes and neutron stars.