5 ms·
The problem with lisp is that most programmers find the syntax extremely off putting. I've been watching this debate go around and around in circles for 20 year
by cageface 6y ago
The problem with lisp is that most programmers find the syntax extremely off putting. I've been watching this debate go around and around in circles for 20 years now and nothing has changed. And as much as I appreciate the power of macros I feel like the features of other modern languages cover a lot of the same ground so the benefits of such a controversial syntax are diminished.
Lisp is a fascinating and very elegant language and every developer can learn something from it but I gave up waiting for the lisp revolution a while ago.
- cageface 6y agoThe other problem with Lisp is that it attracts a fanatical element that rejects any criticsm of the language. Every language has its zealots but Lisp takes it a step further. Google Erik Naggum for an extreme example of this syndrome.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thom 6y agoYeah I just think when a language never has to go back and invent new syntax and junk to keep up, it’s probably doing something right.
- cageface 6y agoLisp got a lot of things right and modern languages have borrowed a lot of ideas that were pioneered in various Lisps. But nobody has borrowed s-expression syntax and I don't think that's an accident.
- samth 6y agoI don't think that's true -- we're discussing a language that was invented relatively recently and has sexpressions. It's just that if a language has lots of parentheses, it gets classified as a lisp.
- john-shaffer 6y agoAs soon as a language borrows s-expressions, it's a Lisp. This makes it impossible in practice for a non-Lisp to just "borrow" s-expressions. Definitely not an accident. On the other hand, you do have languages like XML which is basically a much more cumbersome syntax for s-expressions.
- kamaal 6y ago>>The problem with lisp is that most programmers find the syntax extremely off putting. For all practical purposes Lisp doesn't even have a syntax. The real issue is with programmers who are at beginner and advanced beginner levels all life. This problem existed with Perl too. Agreed that a lot of text manipulation tasks that existed before the data exchange standards like JSON and XML came around don't exist anymore. The use cases for Perl have reduced. But the overall point stands of course. People are willing to write 100 classes to extract a string from data, than learn to write 10 lines of regex code. If the only thing you are willing to learn and use is a for loop, if statement and function/class syntax. Anything will look off putting. Just see how many programmers struggle with concepts like concurrency, pointers, recursion etc. It's just that these people struggle to hold non-trivial concepts in mind.
- cageface 6y agoThere's an elitism inherent in this take that I think is misplaced. A lot of programmers are perfectly capable of weighing the pros and cons of s-expression syntax and deciding it's not for them. Too many Lisp programmers believe that Lisp way is the right way and not just a set of tradeoffs like every other language design.
- yw3410 6y agoOnly a relatively few amount of programmers have programmed in non-Algol syntax in-anger, rather than the reverse. How can you weigh up the pro or con of a syntax when you haven't used it much? I couldn't tell you whether APL syntax was any good.