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Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

Corey Coughlin corey.coughlin at attbi.com
Tue Oct 7 17:19:14 EDT 2003 
I was never very fond of lisp.  I guess I mean scheme technically, I
took the Ableson and Sussman course back in college, so that's what I
learned of scheme, lisp in general I've mostly used embedded in other
things.  In general, it always seemed to me that a lot of the design
choices in lisp are driven more by elegance and simplicity than
usability.  When it comes to programming languages, I really want the
language to be a good tool, and to do as much of the work for me as
possible.  Using parentheses and rpn everywhere makes lisp very easy
to parse, but I'd rather have something easy for me to understand and
hard for the computer to parse.  (Not to mention car, cdr, cadr, and
so on vs. index notation, sheesh.)  That's why I prefer python, you
get a nice algebraic syntax with infix and equal signs, and it's easy
understand.  Taking out ';' at the ends of lines and indenting for
blocks helps me by removing the clutter and letting me see the code. 
And yes, I'm sure you can write macros in lisp to interpret infix
operators and indexing and whatever you want, but learning a core
language that's wildly non-intuitive so that I can make it more
intuitive never seemed like a good use of my time.  Python is
intuitive to me out of the box, and it just keeps getting better, so I
think I'll stick with it.
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