From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: SUMMA SUMMARUM LISP Date: 1999/10/29 Message-ID: <3150208907886348@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 542141930 References: mail-copies-to: never X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 941220119 20174 195.0.192.66 (29 Oct 1999 18:01:59 GMT) Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; +1 510 435 8604; http://www.naggum.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 29 Oct 1999 18:01:59 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Janos Blazi | To say that something is esoteric means that it only those who are | initiated understand it. To say that LISP is esoteric is not a | complaint; it describes tha language as it is. this is not the normal usage of the word, and needs constant explaining. the usual meaning of "esoteric" means "inaccessible". | LISP is for those who in some way like abstract thinking and this is a | very small group of people. A COBOL programmer on the other hand can | write thousands of lines of code a day. I fail to see the relevance of this comparison, which belittles fast coders and good programmers alike and seems to claim that abstract thinkers who can do practical work don't exist. none of this is news, however, since you have made a number of sweeping generalizations that make very little sense. I wish you'd stop to think about what you're saying. the broader issues you bring up with these generalization have mostly been seriously misguided, but just stating the generalization makes it very hard to respond to them intelligently. Lisp is probably more attractive to people who introspect and value precision in their dealings with the world, while those who do neither will find many of its decisions needlessly cumbersome to understand. it's like being in need of cash and not deciding to rob someone because you're capable of considering the ethical and psychological implications of living on stolen money, compared to deciding not to rob someone because you believe you might get caught (the static typing crowd). for what it's worth, my experience indicates that people who care about what they do and put serious emotional investment into doing a good job, will be incompatible with the practices involved in programming certain languages. I could not stomach the C++ paradigm that it not be possible to _understand_ what the precise semantics of a language construct -- you just have to humor the compilers and development systems and visually inspect how constructs and features pan out in practice. this paradigm is so different from what I have come to expect in the Common Lisp world that it is all but impossible to revert to Unix and C programming where you have to spend hours fiddling with half-documented, half-witted junk to get something right so you can trust it. C/C++/Java/Perl/etc are for people who want to make things that work. Common Lisp is for peple who want to make things that don't break. #:Erik