Re: Why I never got into Lisp

Chris Barts <puonegf+hfrarg@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

I bet an ultra-competent macro head could have shrunk code considerably
over the course of the whole program. But in small blocks, Lisp tends to
look flabby compared to Huffman-coded languages like Perl.

I think this has a detrimental effect in how you think about solutions
in languages like Perl. Since certain solution styles have optimized
syntax baked right into the language, going outside those styles
suddenly feels like a lot of hassle and not worth the trouble. I think
that's why a lot of solutions converge tweaking strings with regular
expressions and sticking them into hash tables.

If you can accept Lisp's notion that most constructs (including method
calls, control structures, array references, etc) look somewhat like a
function call, it doesn't feel like you're really going outside the
preferred realm of solutions by simply adding more features that look
somewhat like function calls. Code that uses a specialized forms of
table storage or arrays doesn't look unnatural simply for not being
able to take advantage of a compressed syntax using {} or [].

Zach
.

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