This reminds me of Paul Graham’s articles, in which he claims that LISP programmers are better. But why is it so (whether or not you agree to the conclusion)? There are at least two opposite reasons: 1. Because programmers that learned LISP become better 2. Because good programmers prefer LISP when they come to know it.
No. 1 is true, naturally. No. 2 is not true - I know LISP but I prefer Perl. Others like Python, etc. The reasons I don’t prefer LISP are:
The standards of Common LISP and Scheme don’t define anything practical.
LISP is at the moment incredibly verbose.
As Larry Wall noted, all LISP code comes in parenthesis and so it all looks the same. (Perl is the exact opposite in this regard).
I cannot make heads nor tails of serious LISP code. Many LISPers create so many macros and use them along with regular LISP code, so you keep having to refer to the previous definitions, and make a lot of research to get you started.
SICP Scheme is easy and fun. But serious LISP code can take too much time to understand. OTOH, recently I had little problem reading the source code of other Perl programmers, and extending it or fixing bugs. (likewise for Python).
| Author | Shlomi Fish |
| Work | Post to Linux-IL |
| Published | 2008-07-04 |