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>First, syntax. "But it's easy! In fact, it's the easiest!" you reply. But for the vast majority of programmers, Lisp syntax is not easy. You could argue that t
by vram22 8y ago
>First, syntax. "But it's easy! In fact, it's the easiest!" you reply. But for the vast majority of programmers, Lisp syntax is not easy. You could argue that they just need to be trained. But the syntax is different enough that they are reluctant to try.
Could be more of NIH syndrome, since most of them would have learned another language first, which had an Algol-family or other-than-Lisp syntax (IMO). And regarding "You could argue that they just need to be trained", practice is also needed in order to feel comfortable with it.
- vram22 8y agoDon't have the link handy, but I think I read somewhere that someone calculated the number of characters or punctation (things like parens vs. braces, etc.) for some code using Lisp vs. C-style languages, and showed that (at least for some examples), Lisp code actually took less characters (or punctuation) in total.
- kamaal 8y agoAnother factor could be familiarity, by now people are so used to seeing C like syntax, any things else would feel automatically difficult attracting huge investments in time to learn. Also if most developers have to learn lisp, there have to be enough jobs.
- vram22 8y agoRight, good point. Sort of a chicken-or-egg situation. Also, this reminds me of Paul Graham's famous essay, Beating the Averages [1], about why and how he and his co-founders used Lisp at their startup Viaweb, which was later acquired by Yahoo! for ~40 million USD, IIRC. [1] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html I think it was this essay, along with his other one about the first summer school for founders (which later became Y Combinator), that attracted the attention of a lot of developers (some of whom later became successful YC applicants) and helped both YC and HN take off.