Subject: Re: Common Lisp, the one true religion! From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 19:39:17 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3208966756647218@naggum.net> * Steve Long <stevelong@isomedia.com> > One of the reasons for "spreading the word" about Lisp is to educate. > Most programmers think of it as that "language with all the parentheses" > and are not aware how far it has come since the days of dedicated > machines. I think they think of what kind of benefit the programming languages they are used to would have from being expressed with lots of parentheses. To be honest, that would be incredibly hard to explain because what they already have works just fine for them. The value of the parentheses are seen only when you understand how you can read and process code as data, which _only_ compiler freaks do in other languages. The ability to do code transformations between source and compiler is something most other languages would most probably consider _bad_, because of the horrible experience most people have with trying to do such things in C's excuse for a macro facility, and those who have seen m4 or troff or any of the other disgusting macro facilities out there have reason to retch and puke violently. Not to mention the fact that these guys are taught from day one that they cannot be trusted to remember the types of their variables and now they are asked to relinquish their one safety net: type checking in the compiler. The value of Lisp is outside the reach of these guys. ///