Why don't people like lisp?

[dan]

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

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.

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


"Francis Avila" <francisgavila at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<voobanm4rs7p68 at corp.supernews.com>...
> "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.