Home Original page

Why don't people like lisp?

Edi Weitz edi at agharta.de
Mon Oct 20 06:10:24 EDT 2003 
On 20 Oct 2003 12:29:39 +0300, Ville Vainio <ville.spammehardvainio at spamtut.fi> wrote:

> Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, sure. And 95% of all computer users use Windows so it must
> > be the best OS. You know the "50 million flies" saying?
> 
> Yep, but when exposed to a clearly superior language, one might
> assume that at least a part of the students would get the clue and
> keep on using it after the course.

As the OP wrote, most of these students are taught Scheme, not Common
Lisp. (And, as we have seen quite often on c.l.l., probably by
teachers who force them to use weird recursive constructs and tell
stories about Lisp - "it is slow, it is interpreted, ..." - that have
been obsolete for decades.)

Also, where do you see evidence that /all/ students dismiss Lisp
immediately? We have a constant (albeit small) influx of newbies on
c.l.l.

As a counter-example consider the courses Robert Strandh teaches in
France (Bordeaux?) - they seem to be very successful. He's teaching
Common Lisp and some of his students "got the clue." They even
implemented a perfectly usable window manager in Common Lisp during
the course.[1]

Edi.


[1] <http://common-lisp.net/project/eclipse/>

    The website is mostly empty but you can download the software and
    also subscribe to the mailing list.
More information about the Python-list mailing list