Why don't people like lisp?

[Francis Avila]

"Christian Lynbech" <christian.lynbech at ericsson.com> wrote in message
news:ofu16cme1e.fsf at situla.ted.dk.eu.ericsson.se...
> >>>>> "mike420" == mike420  <mike420 at ziplip.com> writes:
>
> It is still a question of heated debate what actually killed the lisp
> machine industry.
>
> I have so far not seen anybody dipsuting that they were a marvel of
> technical excellence, sporting stuff like colour displays, graphical
> user interfaces and laser printers way ahead of anybody else.

I think what helped kill the lisp machine was probably lisp: many people
just don't like lisp, because it is a very different way of thinking that
most are rather unaccustomed to.  Procedural, imperative programming is
simply a paradigm that more closely matches the ordinary way of thinking
(ordinary = in non-programming, non-computing spheres of human endevor) than
functional programming.  As such, lisp machines were an oddity and too
different for many to bother, and it was easy for them to come up with
excuses not to bother (so that the 'barrier of interest,' so to speak, was
higher.)  Lisp, the language family (or whatever you want to call it), still
has this stigma: lambda calculus is not a natural way of thinking.

This isn't to make a value judgment, but I think it's an important thing
that the whole "functional/declarative v. procedural/OO" debate overlooks.
The same reason why programmers call lisp "mind-expanding" and "the latin of
programming languages" is the very same reason why they are reluctant to
learn it--its different, and for many also hard to get used to.  Likewise,
Americans seem to have some repulsive hatred of learning latin--for people
who are used to english, it's just plain different and harder, even if it's
better. (Ok, that last bit was a value judgement. :)

Python doesn't try (too) hard to change the ordinary manner of thinking,
just to be as transparent as possible. I guess in that sense it encourages a
degree of mental sloth, but the objective is executable pseudocode.  Lisp
counters that thinking the lisp way may be harder, but the power it grants
is out of all proportion to the relatively meager investment of mental
energy required--naturally, it's hard to convince someone of that if they
don't actually _use_ it first, and in the end some will probably still think
it isn't worth the trouble.  It will take very significant and deep cultural
and intellectual changes before lisp is ever an overwhelmingly dominant
language paradigm.  That is, when it becomes more natural to think of
cake-making as

UD: things
Gxyz: x is baked at y degrees for z minutes.
Hx: x is a cake.
Ix: x is batter.

For all x, ( (Ix & Gx(350)(45)) > Hx )

(i.e. "Everything that's a batter and put into a 350 degree oven for 45
minutes is a cake")

...instead of...

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Place batter in oven.
3. Bake 45 minutes
4. Remove cake from oven.

(i.e. "To make a cake, bake batter in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes")

...then lisp will take over the universe.  Never mind that the symbolic
logic version has more precision.

--
Francis Avila