Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

[Kenny Tilton]

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:
> Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote previously:
> |>>The bottom line is that no regular Lisper is bothered by parens [...]
> 
> |Anders J. Munch wrote:
> |> Or to put it another way, noone who is bothered by parens becomes a
> |> regular Lisper.
> 
> Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote previously:
> |Cute, but I will go out on a limb and say no one who tried Lisp and
> |liked it was driven away by parens.
> 
> Well... isn't that -exactly- Anders point (and the point of the other
> 99.9% of programmers who don't use Lisp)?!

No. Anders suggests that Lisp in effect selects for programmers who can 
deal with parens. I am saying no one who spends enough time doing Lisp 
(three weeks?) even notices them anymore. They are no more bothersome 
than the spaces between words. As someone else said, Lispers are 
eyeballing the (automatically provided!) indentation. I should think 
Pythoners would appreciate that. :)

> 
> Most people who tried Lisp didn't like it BECAUSE of the parens.

They might come away /talking about/ parens, but if so they did not get 
very far. Maybe just a few weeks exposure (and just a few hours coding) 
during a functional language overview?

> But despite (or because of) reading several popular and widely
> recommended Lisp books, I just cannot look at it for very long -because
> of the parens-.

Aha! Were you just reading? I can't read code anyway, especially in a 
new language. And Lisp with its flowing, functional syntax can be hard 
to follow--so much is going on.

Now if you said you had been programming /heads down/ for a week or two, 
loved the language, but hated the parens and dumped it, I would think 
you were not using a Lisp-aware editor (hard to imagine) or had some 
perceptual idiosyncrasy that made the parens a problem (I know people 
who cannot parse computer screens /period/.)

This could be a breakthrough: people try /reading/ Lisp and get turned 
off (perhaps because they have not learned to parse the indentation and 
are staring at the parens). Those who sit down to work in Lisp just sail 
right past the issue.


Maybe I am off on the one-three weeks guess. It has been a while since I 
went thru the learning curve. The one thing i recall taking longest was 
learning always to /start/ with a parens, esp. at the interactive Lisp 
command line. The transition comes when you stop /doing/ parens and 
start /leveraging/ them and the automatic formatting they support.

> 
> The thing is, I really WANT to like Lisp.  I just cannot seem to force
> myself to.  Then again, emacs also seems like a strange, unmanageable
> monstrosity... so I guess those go hand in hand.

Haven't learned Emacs yet, which makes me a bit of an oddity. But all 
the Lisp IDEs have Lisp-aware editors. They are indispensible.

-- 

  kenny tilton
  clinisys, inc
  ---------------------------------------------------------------
""Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor,
   and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.""
                                                   Elwood P. Dowd