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I read your message about "Lull" and a Dutch guy sitting behind me laughed out loud when I said the name of your language. (My dictionary says "lul" means "prick" or "cock" in slang, so it's a bit more explicit than "dick"!) This just goes to prove that how you name a language is important (but not as important as designing the language so it doesn't suck...)!

On the "too many parens" excuse for disliking Lisp: so why do you use XML and HTML? They have TWICE the number of parens, which are pointy instead of rounded, but lots of people seem to use them anyway. So "too many parens" is just a convenient and shallow excuse for disliking Lisp that avoids examining the real issue.

The real problem that many people have with Lisp is because it's perceived as a homosexual programming language, which causes unconscious cognitive dissonance, so people have to grasp for more socially acceptable reasons for disliking the language (like "too many parens"). Nobody wants to just say "I hate Lisp because it sounds gay", so instead they say "too many parens", even though most other languages suffer from too few parens, and are much less readable than Lisp because of their insane hierarchies of precedence rules. Programming tips 101: ALWAYS use parens even if you're sure the precedence rules will make your _expression_ do what you want, because 1) other people need to be able to read the code and 2) you may be wrong. Drop any copy of K&R on the table so it lands on the spine and opens to a commonly used page, and I bet it opens on the table of precedence rules, because that's the page everyone always turns to. Lisp code never suffers from this problem.

The first thing most typical homophobic Americans think of when they hear the word Lisp is the gay stereotype of speaking with a lisp, so it unconsciously terrifies them. And the fact that "lambda" signifies unity under oppression, and is used as the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered symbol only reinforces that impression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_symbol#Lambda ...And then there's the purple cover of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, with the two gay dudes on the cover.

Anyway, millions of people program in Lisp every day with C syntax, but they just call it _javascript_, and suffer without macros, because of the inferior C syntax.

    -Don


Alex Queiroz wrote: 
Hallo,

On Nov 27, 2007 9:07 PM, Stephen Kellett <lua@objmedia.demon.co.uk> wrote:
  
Stephen
(*) Come be real, who uses Lisp for commercial projects? Great language,
but too many parens and no one uses it. Its the equivalent of Esperanto.
So much promise, so little delivery.

    
     And the FUD never ends...

- http://franz.com/success/
- http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html
- http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/l_e_t_lisp.html?catid=7
- http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

and on and on..