Why don't people like lisp?

[Frode Vatvedt Fjeld]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:

> Describing a situation of having 99 available strategies rather than
> 100 as "doesn't give you a choice" can be charitably described as
> "ridiculous", it seems to me.

But it's not 100 against 99, it's 2 against 1. The two are functional
and syntactic abstraction.

And: All programming can be seen as an exercise in building a
language, where the programming language per se is merely a starting
point and provider of mechanisms for extending that starting point. So
whenever you define a function (or macro) you extend the language,
usually in the direction of some particular application area.

The "but I'm not a programming language designer" argument against
macros is very common and very bogus. Every programmer is.

-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld