Why don't people like lisp?

[Simon András]

danbmil99 at yahoo.com (dan) writes:

> Google ate my long post, so I'll make it simple.

Thank you. 

> 
> Lisp failed (yes, it did) because of the parentheses.  Normal people
> can't parse 13 close-parens easily.  Functional notation is
> non-intuitive and hard to read.

Yes, you're right, lisp failed, it's dead, and has been for about two
decades now. (Search google for posts like yours from the last century
to confirm this.) But somehow this doesn't stop it thriving, so it's
probably one of the the healthiest dead languages in the history of
IT.

And of course the culprit is the parantheses. (Thank you for telling
us about it! Dylan people will be especially delighted about the
news.)  Although ten years ago it was GC, and before that it was that
it needed special hardware to run at acceptable speed.

It's also true that normal people can't parse 13 close parens. Most
Lispers probably can't either, and they definitely don't. Do
pythonistas count whitespace?

I'm grateful for your concise critique of "functional notation".  I
assume you mean prefix notation, and considering that algoloid
languages also use this for functions, you should probably switch to
Forth (too bad you probably think it's dead, too). Silly me, I thought
that the charm of infix notation disappears at functions of arity 3 or
more.

> 
> The world is moving in the direction of languages like Python, that
> fit naturally with how we speak and write.

This is _so_ true, I wonder why it reminds me of the following:

"A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the
French language that in it words occur in the order in which one
thinks them."
                                         Wittgenstein, PI 336

Bye, 
Andras