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1. Lisp have less symbols than other language (defun averagenum (n1 n2 n3 n4) (/ ( + n1 n2 n3 n4) 4) ) vs function averagenum(n1, n2, n3, n4){

1. Lisp have less symbols than other language (defun averagenum (n1 n2 n3 n4) (/ ( + n1 n2 n3 n4) 4) ) vs function averagenum(n1, n2, n3, n4){ return (n1 + n2 + n3 + n4)/4 } Lisp 9 vs 13 JavaScript(excluding keywords and return) 2, 3 ,4 , 5, 6 -> Chicken and egg problems, Lisp is not popular enough an this makes things difficult. Lisp real issues are: 1. Fragmentation: Scheme, CL, Clojure, ELisp, Racket... 2. Tooling: package manager, build system, support outside emacs. 3. Concurrency and safety: some do better than other but added to late.

gedy 9y ago
True, but the issue is that most academic and vast majority of paid coding roughly looks like the JavaScript example (C/C++/Java/JS/etc) - so to most the Lisp style looks odd and hard to parse, not the raw symbol count.
- Chyzwar 9y ago
  Lisp style is more elegant, almost everything is either data or function. Other languages you mention are massively more complex and difficult to understand. For me C++ is some kind of clusterfuck of symbols/keywords/operators and plain magic. After you learn prefix notation, Lisp is super easy. Unfortunately in the world were "worse is better" we discard beautiful and smart: Smalltalk, Lisp and ML. Instead we build our towers of Babel using PHP, JavaScript and C++. It is so ridiculous that people choose to spend whole career using PHP because it is easy learn.
  - lelandbatey 9y ago
    It is not. When it comes to learning anything, we humans have a massive tendency to prefer that which is familiar. This means that when a human is faced with an obstacle and must choose between: - An unfamiliar tool or paradigm which is custom built to solve this and all future problems (should they arise) such that time and effort is saved - A familiar tool which has been extended this one time to solve this one problem, and which can be inellegantly extended to solve future problems potentially at the cost of time and effort People will almost always pick the later.
    - kazinator 9y ago
      Yes. If you introduce basic Lisp like (+ 2 2) to kids that don't know infix arithmetic yet, it's very revealing.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    I find the argument that Lisp needing fewer symbols means that it's simpler to be suspect. Imagine if we took English, and replaced all punctuation with parentheses. Would it be "simpler"? In some very academic way, probably. I'm not at all confident it would actually be easier to read. This is really something that needs input from people who professionally deal with the way our brains process visual information, especially text. It might be that there's value in having more varied and fancy punctuation, e.g. because the differences between ( and [ and { serve as anchor points for visual pattern matching. It would be interesting to have an experiment whereby people not previously exposed to any PL have to analyze a code snippet in, say, Lisp vs JS vs Python side by side, and discover its structure (e.g. by drawing it as a block diagram).

gedy 9y ago

True, but the issue is that most academic and vast majority of paid coding roughly looks like the JavaScript example (C/C++/Java/JS/etc) - so to most the Lisp style looks odd and hard to parse, not the raw symbol count.

Chyzwar 9y ago
Lisp style is more elegant, almost everything is either data or function. Other languages you mention are massively more complex and difficult to understand. For me C++ is some kind of clusterfuck of symbols/keywords/operators and plain magic. After you learn prefix notation, Lisp is super easy. Unfortunately in the world were "worse is better" we discard beautiful and smart: Smalltalk, Lisp and ML. Instead we build our towers of Babel using PHP, JavaScript and C++. It is so ridiculous that people choose to spend whole career using PHP because it is easy learn.
- lelandbatey 9y ago
  It is not. When it comes to learning anything, we humans have a massive tendency to prefer that which is familiar. This means that when a human is faced with an obstacle and must choose between: - An unfamiliar tool or paradigm which is custom built to solve this and all future problems (should they arise) such that time and effort is saved - A familiar tool which has been extended this one time to solve this one problem, and which can be inellegantly extended to solve future problems potentially at the cost of time and effort People will almost always pick the later.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    Yes. If you introduce basic Lisp like (+ 2 2) to kids that don't know infix arithmetic yet, it's very revealing.
- int_19h 9y ago
  I find the argument that Lisp needing fewer symbols means that it's simpler to be suspect. Imagine if we took English, and replaced all punctuation with parentheses. Would it be "simpler"? In some very academic way, probably. I'm not at all confident it would actually be easier to read. This is really something that needs input from people who professionally deal with the way our brains process visual information, especially text. It might be that there's value in having more varied and fancy punctuation, e.g. because the differences between ( and [ and { serve as anchor points for visual pattern matching. It would be interesting to have an experiment whereby people not previously exposed to any PL have to analyze a code snippet in, say, Lisp vs JS vs Python side by side, and discover its structure (e.g. by drawing it as a block diagram).