Subject: Re: Lisp, the incarnation of expressiveness ... From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/05/18 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3136055673861525@naggum.no> * Robert Kiendl <rkiendl@gmx.net> | i am pretty new to the lisp community. : | there seem (to me) some "real" lacks. which other disciplines do you consider yourself sufficiently well versed in to judge while you admit to being pretty new to them? would you, say, walk into a hospital and tell the staff how to run the place? would you take over the operating theater because you had seen a better way to do it on Chicago Hope? do you, say, take the control of boats or planes? or would you perhaps try to learn first instead of judge first in other disciplines? I think the reason people find "lacks" with Lisp is that they actually expect everything in computing to be so simple they can understand it right away, since that's how things work in the mass market segments, where anyone with above average IQ is ahead of the "user-friendly" baby talk. Lisp, however, is not optimized for newbies and well-below-average mass market consumers. Lisp has its own traditions, far removed from the newbiedom that Microsoft, et al, have monopolized and capitalized on. my advice to those who are used to understanding much more than the user friendly crap intended them to do and thus acquire a haughtiness and arrogance towards new fields in computing that they might think are as stupidly designed as the ones they legitimately know better than, is to expect something different from what _looks_ different from what they're used to and to seize the opportunity to learn from the different rather than, effectively, to dumb it down to whatever they already understand much better than the designers. (if you felt insulted by the above, please give up Lisp, too.) #:Erik -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century