Why don't people like lisp?

[Pascal Costanza]

Terry Reedy wrote:

> Last night I accepted the repeated suggestion to download and read
> (some of) OnLisp.  Problem: I *don't* know the arglist structure of
> every form Graham uses, and since Graham assumes such knowledge, I had
> to count parens to reverse engineer function prototypes and determine
> what is an argument to what.  A Python beginner would more easily do
> this with Python code.

Other people have already pointed you to some resources. I have also 
liked the book "Common Lisp, The Language - 2nd edition" (CLtL2) by Guy 
Steele a lot. It is a snapshot of the then ongoing ANSI standardization 
from 1989. The HyperSpec is based on the final ANSI standard, as 
published in 1995.

There are some minor differences between CLtL2 and the ANSI standard, 
but they are neglectable, especially for a beginner. CLtL2 is generally 
more accessible IMHO - better overall structure and more examples. It 
feels a little bit like an advanced tutorial. When in doubt, refer to 
the HyperSpec.

CLtL2 can be downloaded for free at 
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/html/cltl/cltl2.html

> I will admit that after a few chapters, the parens did begin to fade a
> bit.  They are a surface issue.  I think some others are more
> important.

Yes, exactly.

> Lisp-aware editors do not solve the problem of reading Lisp code
> embedded in text, as with OnLisp formatted .ps or .pdf.

That's right. A good exercise is to type in the code that you find in 
the books by yourself. This should make you get a better feel for how to 
read Lisp code.


Pascal