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And not being Lisp is one of the big reasons for the success of both Python and Ruby. :-)

FLAMEBAIT -> FLAMEBAIT




I fail to see how that is flame bait. It's actually a quite insightful statement that is worth repeating: Python, Ruby and all other languages exist for a reason. The reason is that other languages, including Lisp, are not considered to be equally useful for the tasks for which a specific language is being used. Python is not only not Lisp: it's not Java, not Haskell, not Erlang, not ...

Whether it is a good reason, and whether these considerations are sensible, is a separate discussion. Whichever way you put it: they exist and should be acknowledged.


I agree. Lisp just plain looks weird because of all the parentheses and the prefix notation. I also can't help get the feeling that even with macros available to me, coding directly in the form of parse trees just might not be optimal. Also, it makes my head hurt sometimes.

As I sit here writing this, it strikes me that someone who's using these kinds of things to avoid learning Lisp is a lot like the Python newbie who's discovered the language and wanders on to comp.lang.python complaining about the syntactically significant indentation. As with most matters, I'm inclined to believe that Lisp's problem here is primarily a people problem rather than a technical problem.




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