Why don't people like lisp?

[David Mertz]

|"Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters" <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote in message
|> It NEVER happens that you just cannot solve a problem
|> because of the lack of some novel syntax to do so... that's what
|> libraries are for.

"Scott McIntire" <mcintire_charlestown at comcast.net> wrote previously:
|Can't one make the same argument for Visual Basic. Use libraries as the
|method to "build up the language" to a domain.

Sure, in a sense.  But the problem(s) with VB are not that it cannot be
extended to some novel domain syntax because it lacks macros.

VB is a bad language, but it is JUST AS BAD in its "core" areas as it is
when extended to new problems.  There is a very strong disanalogy with
Python here.  Python does a good job of expressing all the basic
*programming* constructs that go into ANY programming domain:  loops,
branches, collections, objects and inheritence, HOFs, declared
constraints, etc.  I have no expectation of EVER seeing some new problem
area that isn't built out of these same application parts.

Once in a great while, something really new comes along in programming
constructs themselves.  OOP was such a thing, HOFs were, multimethods
are at a smaller level, constraint declarations (i.e. logic programming)
were; maybe coroutines are.  Python does all of these things well--see
some of my articles for explanations of some of them where the basic
syntax needs some straightforward (pure-Python) extension modules.

The ONLY example I can think of where a basic construct is difficult to
shoehorn into Python might be AOP.  I remain agnostic about the staying
power of this one, but it might prove important.  There are some modules
out there, and metaclasses let you do it (in a less than elegant way).
On the other hand, Lisp--macros and all--is not any better suited to AOP
than is Python.  I know you can work up something that nominally
qualifies as AOP using obscenely brittle macros... but it's not
something I would want to do.

Yours, David...

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