Subject: Re: Lisp, the incarnation of expressiveness ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/05/18
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3136055673861525@naggum.no>

* Robert Kiendl <rkiendl@gmx.net>
| i am pretty new to the lisp community.
:
| there seem (to me) some "real" lacks.

  which other disciplines do you consider yourself sufficiently well versed
  in to judge while you admit to being pretty new to them?  would you, say,
  walk into a hospital and tell the staff how to run the place?  would you
  take over the operating theater because you had seen a better way to do
  it on Chicago Hope?  do you, say, take the control of boats or planes?

  or would you perhaps try to learn first instead of judge first in other
  disciplines?

  I think the reason people find "lacks" with Lisp is that they actually
  expect everything in computing to be so simple they can understand it
  right away, since that's how things work in the mass market segments,
  where anyone with above average IQ is ahead of the "user-friendly" baby
  talk.  Lisp, however, is not optimized for newbies and well-below-average
  mass market consumers.  Lisp has its own traditions, far removed from the
  newbiedom that Microsoft, et al, have monopolized and capitalized on.

  my advice to those who are used to understanding much more than the user
  friendly crap intended them to do and thus acquire a haughtiness and
  arrogance towards new fields in computing that they might think are as
  stupidly designed as the ones they legitimately know better than, is to
  expect something different from what _looks_ different from what they're
  used to and to seize the opportunity to learn from the different rather
  than, effectively, to dumb it down to whatever they already understand
  much better than the designers.

  (if you felt insulted by the above, please give up Lisp, too.)

#:Erik
-- 
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century