The reductive take on why LOOP is liked in this post really speaks to the ability of LISP crowds to eat themselves. Holy crap at the amount of condescension th

The reductive take on why LOOP is liked in this post really speaks to the ability of LISP crowds to eat themselves. Holy crap at the amount of condescension that can be felt. To quote, "It seems to me that the principal advantages of the LOOP syntax are that some people are used to it already and that some small number of people think that it is cute." Cute? I think it is rather expressive and does a good job fencing off areas of the code that are likely to be expensive. Is it required? Of course not, but the downsides listed in this post are... no different than claiming something as "cute." I can almost buy that reading non-LOOP is faster. The problem, of course, is that for a lot of places reading the LOOP /should/ be done slower. That or taken as a bit of a given in the larger code. This is one of the things I loved about the FORMAT macro. Quoting https://gigamonkeys.com/book/a-few-format-recipes.html https://gigamonkeys.com/book/a-few-format-recipes.html, "[moving to expressions] is not too bad, but anyone reading this code has to mentally parse it just to figure out that all it's doing is printing the contents of list to standard output. On the other hand, you can tell at a glance that the following expression is printing list, in some form, to standard output" That is, yes, it can take more effort to figure out what the loop is doing. But often that is something that is going to take more effort anyway. So, rather than build on familiarity of some in the crowd; the new folks shoulder their way to the table and tell everyone that what they are familiar with is bad. And they should feel childish for liking cute things... Congrats for killing your crowd.