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Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

Robin Munn rmunn at pobox.com
Mon Dec 2 16:11:58 EST 2002 
Patrick W <patrickw106 at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> maney at pobox.com writes:
> 
>> examples) and it may be considerable.  Lisp is, if not unique, still
>> unusual in that it has a second speed bump, because its syntax is
>> extremely awkward to deal with until you've acclimated to a suitable
>> IDE or syntax-aware editor.  This conceptually unnecessary additional
>> barrier to entry must surely help hold down the rate at which new
>> converts make it through to become happy Lisp users.
> 
> You imply that a struggle with Lisp's syntax is inevitable for
> newbies, but that definitely was *not* the case for me.  I came to
> Lisp from C, C++, Eiffel, Delphi and a few other languages that bear
> not the slightest resemblance to Lisp.  From day one, Lisp's syntax
> seemed simple and straightforward; I never found it awkward at all,
> let alone "extremely awkward".  On the contrary, it 'felt'
> frictionless to my mind, quite unlike other languages I've learned.
> 
> What I find hard to understand is why anybody finds s-expressions a
> conceptual challenge.  If I hadn't seen evidence to the contrary, I'd
> believe that anyone who can't grok s-expressions in a day is just too
> stupid to program *anything*. 

I find s-expressions conceptually quite easy to understand. If someone
had explained the concept of "Code is data, that's why there's all the
parentheses" to me earlier (i.e., in my Programming Languages class in
college), I might have put up with the parentheses long enough for them
to "disappear" (that is, for me not to notice them anymore). As it so
happened, nobody explained that concept to me at the time, so I didn't
like the syntax.

Now? Well, I'll probably get to understand Lisp well enough that I'll
come to like the syntax. But I still believe that Lisp's syntax creates
a pretty steep learning curve, steeper than other languages. The
steepness of the learning curve is, I believe, one of the main reasons
that Python is more popular than Lisp.

Evidence from my own experience backs up this theory. When I first
looked at Python, I had no trouble understanding the code. It "just
clicked" for me. Yet even now, with quite a bit of experience under my
belt since I first looked at Lisp, I still have to work at being able to
read Lisp code. Not that I can't do it, but it takes mental effort. Once
I actually learn Lisp, I expect that mental effort to be much less, but
at the moment, I still have a steep learning curve to climb.

Struggling with Lisp's syntax may not be inevitable for newbies, but it
certainly seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

-- 
Robin Munn <rmunn at pobox.com>
http://www.rmunn.com/
PGP key ID: 0x6AFB6838    50FF 2478 CFFB 081A 8338  54F7 845D ACFD 6AFB 6838
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