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

[Jacek Generowicz]

"Anders J. Munch" <andersjm at dancontrol.dk> writes:

> "Jacek Generowicz" <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
> > 
> > I still fail to see why you think colour highlighting is necessary, or
> > even useful for this. Emacs highlights matching parentheses, brackets
> > and braces for me. 
> 
> It should be noted that in a vanilla configuration Emacs only blinks
> parens as they are typed.

This does tend to be true for FSF Emacs ... for which the magic
incantation is (show-paren-mode 1). On XEmacs it happens by default.

> But thanks for mentioning this, you prompted me to go discover
> mic-paren, which is sweet.

Hmm ... not convinced about it. My initial reaction is that it flashes
up too much stuff, and therefore seems a bit annoying ... but I'll
work with it for a while and see if I get used to it.

> >I would find it hard to believe that other editors
> > do not have such capabilities. (If your editor cannot provide such a
> > feature, well, it might be time to reconsider your choice of editor.)
> 
> Sometimes my editor of choice is a printout with handwritten annotations. 

But then you will not be concerned with inserting the correct number
of parentheses to close an expression which you are typing ... at
which point indentation gives pretty much all the clues you need.

(I sometimes use "]" as a superbracket, is such situations.)

My biggest problem with reading lisp on hard copy is when a bit of
code is split on two pages ... then I get lost _very_ easily, because
I lose much of the indentation related information.