Re: Why is LISP syntax superior?

Wolfram Fenske wrote:
keke@xxxxxxx (Takehiko Abe) writes:
Ah. I guess Lisp is not for you then.

I think that either you like it or you hate it on the first
sight. Do not try too hard. It's futile.

Not necessarily. At least, it wasn't for me. When I first saw lisp,
I thought the designers were simply too lazy to write a real parser
and that the language wasn't all that great. Much later, I stumbled
upon Paul Graham's essays where he claimed over and over that lisp was
the most powerful programming language ever invented, and after
reading several of them, I started believing him. To see what it's
all about, I bought Peter Seibel's excellent book, "Practical Common
Lisp," finally got macros and now I'm something of a convert.
Understanding macros is essential to appreciating the power of lisp,
though. IMO, if lisp didn't have its macro system, there'd be no
significant advantage over, say, Python and hardly any justification
for its (lack of) syntax.


An interesting view, and quite the opposite of what makes me thick. It
is precisely the lack of syntax that I admire in Lisp (Scheme actually).
I did learn Python (some years ago), and did not like the extra syntax
much, but most of all what made me drop Python was that at version 2.1,
they still did not get the lexical scope properly (failing to create
closures). As for really impressive syntax languages like Java, I did
manage to read one 900+ Java book, but it was a really painful
experience. I had to constantly flip back not for failing to understand
how exercises were supposed to be solved, but for not being able to
remember the ton of syntax that Java was throwing at me. But then again,
I'm getting old, so maybe that is the problem :-)

-- Hrvoje
.

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