Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: Barry Shelton <barry.shelton@columbiasc.attgis.com>
Subject: Re: scheme is supposed to help me concentrate on concepts...why is it so WEIRD?!
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Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 19:25:57 GMT
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Regarding Lisp syntax, Ken Hirsch wrote:

>It obviously *does* make it harder to learn LISP.

This is not at all obvious to me; indeed my experience has
been quite different.  I found Lisp syntax to be the easiest to
learn of any programming language syntax I've encountered
so far (see note below).

>Why should special forms look like function calls look like
>function definitions look like assignments look like
>expressions, etc.?

I'd turn this around and ask why a simple, consistent syntax
shouldn't be easiser to learn than a complex ad-hoc syntax?

I'm not disputing that *you* find Lisp syntax difficult to learn
and Lisp code difficult to read; I'm just pointing out that that's
not universally true.

(Note: I first learned Lisp thirteen years ago and have written
a lot of code in various flavors (mostly Scheme and Common
Lisp now) of Lisp in the years since then.  I've also written code
in Awk, BASIC, C, C++, Caml, COBOL, Dylan, Eiffel, Forth,
FORTRAN, Haskell, Icon, J, OPS5, Pascal, Prolog, Python,
SML, SNOBOL, TCL, various assembly languages, various
UNIX shells, and probably others that don't come immediately
to mind.  I claim that *for me*, Lisp syntax was easiest to
learn, and well-written Lisp code is the most readable. YMMV)

Barry Shelton
barry.shelton@columbiasc.ncr.com

