Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?


Alok wrote:

Since most lisp developers use indentation to make code readable
anyway, would it be possible to combine parens and indentation to
produce a cleaner syntax that can be as easily parsed by the lisp
compiler/interpreter? The readability of such code would increase a lot
(at least for a beginner like me).

This is all red herring. Parens are what people whine about because
they haven't seen something *else* compelling about Lisp. What
converts people is killer apps. If, for instance, I showed game
developers amazing things in OpenGL using Lisp that they couldn't do
some other way, and it was really really important stuff, they'd use
it. Failing a killer app, it's just a language. Not having anything
to distinguish itself, people whine about parens. So stop worrying
about perceived paren problems. Start worrying about killer apps.
Most of the popularized scripty languages delivered a compelling web
framework. Ruby's got Rails, Python's got Zope, etc.

People will use the most broken crufty *** of an interface in the
world, if it actually *DOES* something important to them.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

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